William Falkland 01 - The Royalist (23 page)

‘That’s not what I meant!’

There was silence between us for what felt the longest time. ‘Carew was looking after Hotham, the third boy to hang,’ I said at last. ‘They knew Fletcher from the printing press. They worked it and made him serve as they made old Mrs Miller serve. They had him delivering . . . I thought it was Bibles but it wasn’t. It was this.’ I produced the pamphlet she’d given me. ‘Have you heard,’ I said, ‘of this man, Hopkins?’

I opened the pamphlet to the correct page and spread it out. The candlelight spilled over it and lit the pictures of devils and familiars in terrible orange light. As the flame moved they appeared to dance. It was a trick as magical as any the man Hopkins must have been using to catch and try his witches. Miss Cain hovered over it. She traced the inky pictures with her finger but, before she could speak, there came a sudden sound of wood hammered against wood, of somebody grappling hard to get through the front door. We froze and then I took her knife and pushed past her through the scullery door.

‘It’s me they’ve come for. I shouldn’t have brought this on you.’ I faced the door with only the glow of the candles behind me to light my way.

‘Falkland!’ The hammering on the door came again. The voice was Warbeck. I strode forward and kicked the chair so it fell and unlatched the door. Warbeck came in fast, the naked sabre still in his hand, and he only scabbarded it when the chair was back against the door. ‘They didn’t follow,’ he said. ‘I saw to that. But who’s to say how many more there are?’ He flashed me a nasty smile. ‘Did you see the bruise on that other pikeman’s face?’

I shook my head. I had not.

‘I fancy you landed a blow or two on him when he took you in that alley two nights back. Got a good piece of him.’

‘We should go to Fairfax,’ I said, but Warbeck shook his head. He pushed me out of the way to come down the hallway, stopping his stampede only when he saw Miss Cain in the scullery door. He poured himself a cup of wine and told Kate to get a fire going. ‘No Black Tom, not yet. There’s no more sleep for us tonight,’ he growled. ‘So Falkland – have you got Cromwell’s answer for him?’

I looked at the table where the pamphlet still lay. ‘I fancy the answer is in there,’ I began.

Warbeck and Miss Cain looked back at it.

‘What became of them?’ I asked.

‘The one I shot will die if he’s not dead already,’ Warbeck replied, his eyes lingering on the pamphlet. ‘The others loped away as soon as the opportunity presented itself.’

‘Into camp?’ I asked.

Warbeck nodded. ‘They didn’t much like the look of my sabre but they didn’t seem terrified as though they’d been found out in some scheme that would get them hanged. It’s a troubling thing, that. What did he want of you besides to see you dangle from the very tree you came to investigate?’ He scoffed at me. ‘A poor report
that
would make to Cromwell.’

Miss Cain finished at the fire as I sat. She came to stand at my back, rested her hands on my shoulders and leaned into me. I produced Carew’s knife. In the light of a new candle I turned it over, marvelling at the way the orange flame flickered along the contours of the collapsible blade. ‘It’s Carew’s dagger,’ I said. ‘But not the one he drew on me.’

I turned to the pamphlet’s pages about Hopkins, the roaming Witch-finder General, and began to read aloud. ‘“Men must be watcheful for Witch spots which doe not bleed no matter if a blade be administered. Though it be meanly esteemed of, this is yet the surest and safest way to judge.” I think,’ I said, ‘that this is our answer.’

We froze, all three, at the sound of another hand on the door. Whoever it was they quickly passed but they were out there. They were letting us know.

‘I’ve seen already,’ I went on with a level look at Warbeck, ‘what this New Model is. A bastard army, sweeping across the kingdom, rounding up whatever boys it can find, no matter what their allegiance, no matter what their ideals. Roundhead or cavalier, Catholic or Protestant, it doesn’t matter to Cromwell.’ I looked at them plainly. ‘But I fancy it matters to Fairfax and it certainly mattered to these boys,’ I said. ‘It matters to the soldiers who organise tourneys in the squares. It matters to the lads who secretly go looking for the Mass, for communion or confession. It matters to the camp whores who sneak out at night to plant crosses in their lovers’ graves to steer them on their way to Heaven. Cromwell overlooked one thing when he set about making this monster. A soldier’s body might be bought by regular pay and regular food but his spirit cannot be bought so easily. I said as much to Fairfax last night. He understands the truth of it.’

In that instant I relived again the moment when King Charles told me to look the other way, told me that soldiers did what soldiers did, that one ravisher in our ranks was not an aberration.

‘There was something the camp whore said. Mary. She was a lover to one of the boys who hanged himself, the one named Wildman. He spent some time away from her, stewing in envy, and when she saw him again she said he was changed. I expected to hear how he was murdered by some Puritan gang, most likely by Carew, but she swore he took his own life. He said to her . . .’ Here I struggled to remember the exact words though the image was burned into my mind. ‘He said he would rather hang by his own hand than die at somebody else’s pyre. I took it to mean he couldn’t face another battle when the spring came around but it was more than that.’ I lifted up the dagger and teased the point with my finger.

‘They talk of it all over camp and it’s in here too,’ I said, tapping my finger to the pamphlets, ‘how every royalist is a Catholic, how every Catholic is in league with devils. That story they tell, of Prince Rupert’s little dog Boy – as if that yapping little terrier is anything more than an overgrown rat . . .’ I admit it: I hated that dog, even if it was no witch’s familiar. I looked at Warbeck again. ‘Do you remember the day we arrived? Do you remember the soldier who came out of his hut as we entered that night, how he looked at us with a face as though he’d seen the devil himself? Do you remember the two men in the alley by the church who turned and fled? Where I found the rosary? Why, even Kate, when Fairfax brought us to the door, thought we were here to hunt witches. The camp is rife with it. How? Fairfax can talk of rumours and of dancing girls with the itch if he likes, but what if some of the soldiers here have decided to make this army how they see it
should
be? You’ve seen yourselves how ardent some men are. How much passion! We were all there on the Day of Admonishment. We’ve read their books of soldier’s verse. What if Carew and the other boys running that press decided that something had to be done?’

Warbeck’s eyes boggled but I saw he understood. ‘What you’re suggesting is preposterous!’ he exclaimed, showering us with spittle. A speck must have landed in the candle flame for it sizzled and flickered. ‘This is an army – a united army!’ He couldn’t take his eyes off the pamphlet. I caught once more the reek of his rotten breath.

‘So united that half its officers are under suspicion?’ I said. ‘Some of them even having to be spied upon . . .’ I said that more pointedly than I might have done, for we all knew what I meant. ‘So united that Cromwell sends his own man and does not trust his general?’

‘So they start printing these pamphlets,’ Kate said. ‘With pictures of devils and witch-finders and instructions on how a man can tell a witch for himself.’

‘It says it bold as day – this Matthew Hopkins is a witch-finder through his knowledge and experience, not through any sorcery of his own.’

‘And they have that boy Fletcher distributing the pamphlets?’

I nodded. ‘The stories start to take hold. Royalists are being spat on already. It only takes a little push, another bastard telling that story about Boy, for the idea to start breeding. Royalists, Catholics, devil whores – they’re all the same thing. What’s needed now is some
evidence
. Just a little. Something that proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that there are sorcerers inside this camp . . .’

With a suddenness, I lunged and stabbed Warbeck in the arm, right where it met his shoulder. The blade disappeared, seemingly sinking into his flesh. Warbeck’s eyes flew wide. He lurched back and jumped to his feet, reaching for his sabre, and then stopped.

‘Falkland!’

I pushed the pamphlet towards him. ‘According to what is written here,’ I said, ‘you are a sorcerer, a plaything of the devil.’

I showed him the blade. I watched the wonder in his eyes as he looked at the wound he thought I’d given him, as he touched it with his fingers and found they came away dry, that he was not injured at all, not even marked. Miss Cain took the knife and pressed it slowly into her own palm. She trembled, for now she understood what I had realised back under the tree.

Bitterly, Warbeck pushed me aside. ‘Don’t suicides go to Hell, Falkland?’

‘You can hardly call it suicide,’ I spat. I could not stop my mind from straying to that terrible moment when Wildman and Whitelock felt the rope around their necks; I’d so nearly joined them. ‘I’ll wager Carew looked among those he knew to be royalists and Catholics. Most would be too level-headed to be tricked. They’d find the young ones, the most naïve, the most susceptible. If you drag a man to the edge of a cliff and tell him to jump then it’s a fool who jumps. But Warbeck, if you tell him to jump or be damned, if you make him
believe
 . . .’ I slipped the dagger into my belt and took a final slug of wine. ‘And then when hundreds of Puritan boys around you have seen how a few royalists truly
are
in league with the devil, how long is it before the lynchings start? How long before the only evidence anyone needs is a rosary or a crucifix or a whispered word in the dark?’

I marched into the hallway. Miss Cain hurried after. ‘It doesn’t explain Hotham,’ she said. ‘If what Carew said was true, if it was Hotham running the printing press, then why would he end up hanging from that branch as well?’

I kicked the chair out of the way. ‘It doesn’t explain Fletcher either. But if you have a thread, at least you can follow it. Perhaps that part of Carew’s story was true. Or perhaps Wildman’s friends wished to show that they, too, were capable.’ I remembered their words:
we do not consider the scales balanced
.

Kate seized my arm. ‘What will you do?’ she demanded. ‘You can’t go out there again!’

‘I’ll do what I was sent here to do. I’ll reveal what happened to those boys. I’ll make my report to Fairfax and then to Cromwell.’ I stopped. I fancied I could even feel the rope chafing my neck. ‘Then my debt is done. Then I’m gone.’

I opened the door with a flourish, half expecting to see Carew and his pikemen ranged around. All that I saw was whiteness, the hypnotic snow still falling gently down. Before crossing the threshold I stopped. ‘Miss Cain,’ I said. ‘I have to cross the camp. I have to reach Black Tom. Once it’s with him they have no cause to come after us. Stay here with Warbeck and open the door to no one until morning.’

Warbeck had come out into the hall as well now. He shook his head. ‘Are you mad, Falkland? Now you’ll close that door and listen to me.’

CHAPTER 22

In the hallway, Warbeck held me fast. He spoke more words in those few minutes, I think, than over all the days of our journey from London, and yet, as he related his tale, I could not see how I could claim any one part of it to be a surprise. Cromwell had indeed sent an intelligencer to survey the New Model Army but
I
was merely a cloak. While Black Tom had his eyes on me, Warbeck was at work, the real intelligencer.

‘We’ll go to Fairfax in time,’ said Warbeck when he was done, ‘but I’ll watch and wait a while and see what this Carew does before I burst through Black Tom’s doors.’

And the boys, the suicides, the witching tree? Cromwell could hardly care. What were they to him? Merely a convenient excuse. But to me, now, they had become something more.

‘Find where Carew camps, Falkland. Keep your eyes on him.’ Warbeck turned away from me as if we were done, but we were not. I caught his shoulder and spun him back to face me.

‘I will do no such thing,’ I told him. ‘Whatever you and Cromwell have hatched between you, I mean to go to Black Tom. I mean to confront him with what is happening right under his nose. At his own press! And I will not be moved on this by anything short of a musket ball.’

Warbeck regarded me coldly. ‘If needs be, Falkland. I would prefer not, but if needs be.’

‘And will you shoot me too?’ demanded Kate.

I pushed for the door. ‘I’ll go alone,’ I said.

‘And if Carew and his gang come while you are gone?’ Kate asked.

Warbeck bared his teeth and graced us both again with his rotten breath. It took all his will, I think, to relent. ‘We go together then. All of us. But Falkland, I implore you to caution! Do not barge in to Black Tom’s house full of half-grown accusation!’

We exited the cottage, finally, onto the lane. I was still in Crediton, the same as it ever was, but now I felt as if there were eyes all over me, watching from the narrow lanes between the cottages. We came to the square where the dead man hung. I thought his hollow, crow-pecked sockets followed us across the untouched snow. In his shadow we stopped. Behind us trails of footprints were imprinted deep into the white blanket of fresh snow. Though flakes still twirled gently over the town, they would not come thickly enough to mask the way we’d gone. Our tracks were plain and so were several others that had come this way before us. If we were not yet being followed then it was only a matter of time.

‘I’ll meet you at the farm!’ hissed Warbeck. He doubled back towards the inn and its stables and I fancied I knew why. I did not much like what I thought it meant: Warbeck was preparing to run.

We didn’t see another soul as we slipped through the middle of the town to where the hulk of Crediton church still sat. Along the lane running to the north – the one that would take us to the hanging tree – lights glowed in the windows of the surgeon’s house. I stopped dead, hidden in the shadows at the end of the lane as two figures emerged and hurried towards us. For a second it felt as if we were outmanoeuvred – the church on one flank, the surgeon’s house on the other. I pulled back, casting my eyes for a place to hide. ‘We’ll have to find another way around,’ I said, my eyes still fixed on the men heading towards us.

Kate scurried us away towards the graveyard. ‘He’s still in there, isn’t he?’ she whispered. ‘Jacob Hotham?’

‘Hotham and the rest, if I’m right. Carew already knows I was in his printing press. He knows I have his dagger. It won’t be long before he understands that I’ve pieced it together. He’ll think I’m going for Jacob.’

‘And?’

‘There’s a time for everything,’ I whispered. ‘Perhaps he won’t be watching for us to go to Black Tom instead.’

We retreated behind the church by one of the thin, winding alleys around the back of the graveyard, up the cobbled shambles where a butcher’s shop sat silent. In the narrow alleys among the cottages behind the church were places where the snow hadn’t reached any real depth and others where the wind had piled huge drifts we were forced to scale as we went. We followed the garden plots where villagers had once kept their vegetable patches, chopped their wood and cared for their chickens, and emerged from the edge of Crediton on its southern slopes. The encampment was sparser here where the winds could howl in from the moors and bury men in snow as they slept, but the tents still spilled around. Between them, low border fires burned inside circles of rock.

‘Where does Carew camp?’ Kate whispered as we edged around the town, keeping to the dark tract of land between the end of the cottages and the first of the tents. I hesitated to answer. I didn’t know and regretted now that I’d not followed him already. He’d come this way when I’d given chase earlier tonight. If I was right then he bedded down in the old Fletcher house close to his printing press – or else in the surgeon’s quarters where he could keep watch over Hotham. Nonetheless I was wary. Here and there I could see soldiers unable to sleep, tramping the feeling back into their toes, bending low to stoke their fires or else keeping their lonely, meandering watches. Any one of them, I supposed, might have been Carew or his pikemen. Any one of them might have relayed a message. How many did he have already drawn to his cause? I had no way to know.

Kate led me away from the bulk of the camp, pressing steadily from the town. In this way we came to the small frozen river that, further downstream, ran close to Fairfax’s farmhouse. Perhaps the ground here had been boggy before it froze – whatever the reason, there were no tents so close to the river. The snow was heavy and we had to plunge through it but at least there was little danger of being seen. We reached the field where the horses were corralled and crept around it. A little stone structure squatted on one side with a great bonfire heaped in front; it was more important, or so it seemed, to guard over these horses than any of the boys in the camp. We crossed the little bridge and I saw from the tracks in the snow that others had crossed not long before us. Ahead, Fairfax’s farmhouse loomed at us at the top of a gentle slope. Even though the way wasn’t steep, somehow it seemed to lord itself over the encampment. There were fires burning inside and a thin plume of smoke rose, dissipating quickly in the snow.

The sky shifted, came apart and closed again. The snowfall strengthened.

‘Come on,’ I said. Again I felt eyes watch us along the way but it wasn’t until we came into the grounds of the farmhouse itself that I had cause to pause. From this distance, through the twirling snowflakes, I could see two men stationed outside the farmhouse door. A third stood at a distance, warming his hands over a low fire, sheltered from the snow by what used to be a chicken coop.

‘Do you see?’ I asked.

Kate drew close to my side. She pressed against me and I was thankful for the warmth. Her eyes found mine. ‘What?’ she asked.

‘The snow,’ I said. ‘Kate, look at the snow.’

The snow around the entrance to the farmhouse was carved up, criss-crossed with the tramping tracks of the guardsmen as they moved back and forth to stave off the bitterness of night, their footsteps dulled and softened by later falls. Yet there was another trail, one that cut across the full expanse of the grounds. It ran from the low stone wall heaped up with snow where we were standing to the door of the farmhouse itself. The prints were crisp and deep, more defined than the confusion where the guards had tramped.

‘One of the guards?’ Kate offered. ‘Caught short?’

‘Perhaps,’ I said.

‘Or Black Tom, out on some errand?’

‘Fairfax should be sleeping.’ I studied the tracks. ‘Besides, these are the prints of a man heading within from without, and in some hurry. Someone has come this way before us.’

‘But who . . . ?’

I looked at her intently. ‘Find yourself somewhere safe,’ I said. ‘Wait for Warbeck. But please don’t go far. I’ve needed you already tonight.’

‘I was there, wasn’t I?’ she said. I thought she was challenging me but she did so with a smile.

‘I may yet need you again.’ I turned. I had a mind to follow the stone wall, circle the farmhouse before the guards knew I was there and judge it from every angle I could. Fairfax, I was sure, was within; but I knew now that he was not alone.

I had only moved a short distance when I spied another figure hurrying along our tracks from the bridge. I tensed, ready to ambush him from behind the wall if I must, but as he approached I saw it was Warbeck. I waited for him to come closer before I revealed myself, then pointed to the tracks in the snow. He understood at once as I thought he might.

‘Carew?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know yet. Go to Kate!’ I told him. ‘Don’t let her out of your sight.’

He laughed at me. ‘I think not! If Carew has gone to Black Tom then everything is changed.’

‘What do you mean?’

Warbeck gave me a pitying look and began creeping closer to the shuttered farmhouse windows, lurking in the shadows to hide from the sleepy watch of the two wandering guards. My heart demanded I should take Kate and be away, take her somewhere safe. But in the end I’d come too far for these boys to abandon them at the last. I followed him without further word, though I fancied Kate watched me for the longest time, at least until I’d gone out of sight round the back of the farmhouse.

There were no guards stationed outside the back door. Here the night was truly silent and the snow untouched but for Warbeck’s footsteps. I followed them as best I could. I didn’t have time to fear I was being watched – we were leaving a trail any halfwit could have followed if they happened upon it – and, as I came to the first broad window, I crouched low to scuttle underneath. The curtains were drawn in the bay but there was light inside. I fancied there had been a fire whose embers now glowed in the hearth. I crept close, pressed hard against the icy stone, and listened for voices on the other side. When I could hear nothing I edged to the handle of the back door and cupped my fist around it. Gently I turned it but the door, held fast by latches on the other side, didn’t move. It wasn’t until I released my hold and fell panting against the stone that I realised how rigidly I’d been holding myself. My breath made a mist around my head and I could hardly see.

The lights were brighter in the second window. I reeled through what little I knew of inside the farmhouse – the entrance hall, the big, stark chamber where Fairfax first received me – and wondered if I was now crouching outside the very same room. From this corner of the farmhouse I could see the back of the stone shed where Fairfax had the captive he wanted strung up for the boys’ suicides. I supposed he must still be inside, huddled up under blankets thick with his own filth. Unless the cold had finally taken him.

‘Falkland!’ I barely heard Warbeck’s hiss, and even when I looked I couldn’t see him until he shifted a little and waved. He’d found himself a corner of blackest shadow right under that other window, pressed up against the wall, so dark as to make himself invisible.

I shifted. Outside the stone cell a man was moving, another camp guard unable to stand sentry without pacing for the cold that gnawed at his bones. Instinctively I kept myself close to the wall, steeped in its shadow, desperate not to be seen. There were voices within. The more I held myself there, the more they came into focus. I pressed myself into the wall so I could hear them better.

‘He’s outside.’

My heart thudded. The voice was familiar: Purkiss; and I thought for one dreadful moment that he was talking about
me
, that Purkiss somehow knew I was here. I looked one way and then the other, yet all I saw was pure white snow. I told myself I must be wrong but it did little to still my pulse.

‘You woke me for this?’ The second voice was Black Tom. I’d have known that thick Yorkshire burr anywhere.

‘I thought you’d want to know.’

‘Very well,’ Black Tom grunted. ‘Bring the bastard in.’

I heard footsteps. More voices, too faint to make out the words, the rattle of a door being closed and then a third voice came from the room, high and haughty, everything Black Tom was not. ‘Sir,’ it began. ‘I beg thanks for receiving me. I am afraid I bring ill news.’

Carew. From the moment I’d seen that trail of footprints across the virgin snow, I’d known who had woken Fairfax in the middle of the night. Known it but hoped it wasn’t so. I feared I already knew what story he was about to spill.

‘If it’s bad news, lad, I’d rather you spat it out.’

‘Very well, sir,’ said Carew. ‘It is the intelligencer. He knows about the pamphlets. He knows about Hopkins. Sir, I think he knows about Wildman and Whitelock, and I think he can prove it.’ Carew paused, as if steadying himself to receive a mighty blow. ‘General, he has my dagger.’

There was silence. Even the snow seemed to hang in the air around my head. Then, like the cold, sharp shock of stepping onto thin ice and plunging into a frozen pool, there came the roar. From the voice I knew it to be Black Tom, but I’ve rarely heard a man sound so much like a devil, even on the battlefield with granadoes exploding and sabres flashing all around. ‘How did it come to it?’ he thundered.

‘General, we did as you bid. We lured him down to the tree and told him a story to satisfy him.’ Carew paused. I thought I could hear, for the first time, a wavering in his voice. ‘But he didn’t believe it. He had others with him. I’m afraid there was a skirmish.’

‘Your ambush was ambushed?’ Black Tom’s voice was full of scorn.

‘Sir, with the utmost respect—’

‘Think very carefully about what you’re about to say, Edmund. People who profess to show respect rarely mean it.’

Carew was silent. For the longest time, nobody said a word.

‘How much does he know?’ Black Tom asked.

‘He’s been to the printing press. He has the dagger. And you already know, sir, that he followed the whores out of camp.’

‘Then he knows the whole sorry tale.’ There was silence. ‘Did he speak to Jacob?’

‘We’ve been watching Hotham closely, sir. He’s not returned to the surgeon’s.’

‘It’s only a matter of time,’ Black Tom said. ‘Carew, you were trusted with this simple task. I had high hopes for you.’