William Falkland 01 - The Royalist (25 page)

CHAPTER 24

Four times they tried to kill me. They came for me on those blasted northern moors and I lived. They cut swathes through my fellows at Edgehill and somehow, deep in dead men, I came through. They routed my company outside Abingdon and cornered me in the thick of night when I had nowhere to run to and nobody to watch my back, but even then it wasn’t my end. They let me loose in the world just to have another chance of running me down. Yes, four times they tried to kill me.

Fourth time lucky.

They weren’t Carew’s men who battered me to the ground that night but they were no more gentle because of it. They beat me down and beat me again until I lost my senses. I have a dim notion they dragged me through the snow. They must have done. The next I knew for certain I was in a cell that stank of filth. It was difficult to know how long I’d been lying there. They’d bound my ankles in chains but, by some strange mercy, had not bound my hands. Even as the days passed, they never did that. Endless times I slipped in and out of consciousness, waking only when a camp guard appeared with thin helpings of pottage and handfuls of snow. I knew where I was. I was in the stone shed behind Black Tom’s farmhouse but Black Tom himself never came. The other man, the one Black Tom thought might serve as our scapegoat, was gone. Dead, I supposed. The cruel irony was that, lying there, I couldn’t even remember why I hadn’t simply shaken Fairfax’s hand, accepted his falsehoods and ridden off to discover what had become of my wife and children. In the end that was all that mattered. Not Whitelock and Wildman. Not Fletcher, no matter how wretchedly those boys had died.

After the third week of it, I began to feel myself wasting away. My body had been living on borrowed time ever since they released me from Newgate. I felt I’d been dead since I first shook Oliver Cromwell’s hand. Sitting here now, smeared in my own filth, images of Kate drifted sluggishly across the backs of my eyes. I hoped she was safe, that she’d escaped and that Warbeck had found some honour buried in his black intelligencer’s heart. For myself I knew there had never really been a chance of being free.

By then my body was revolting. I had pains even where they hadn’t beaten me. I was slowly starving. My guts were telling me to eat, to cram the very earth into my throat, but I wouldn’t. I lay there and listened to the sound of the wind around the stone walls, judging the snowfall by sudden changes in the quality of the air. I didn’t understand why they didn’t simply kill me and be done with it, what kept them from putting the rope around my neck, from declaring me a murderer and hanging me in the square. Perhaps this witch-finder Hopkins was already here, dealing out his godly justice, proclaiming boys right and left to be witches and sodomites for the devil. If that was delaying my hanging, if their gallows were too busy for me, then I didn’t care to think about it. I didn’t want to know. By then I didn’t know if it was day or night. I didn’t know if I was dead or alive.

Just as I had in Newgate, I lost track of the days. It must have been the fourth week when the door of the prison opened, as it sometimes did, and a camp guard entered, stooping low so he didn’t bang his head. Outside there was struggling sunlight behind him, though I couldn’t say if it was dawn or dusk. The snow around the entrance was dirty and packed hard, so I knew there had been no fresh fall in the last few hours. It filled me with rage that I still noticed the details. It meant there was some little part of me that hadn’t quite abandoned all hope. Like my gut with its niggling pains, that mule-headed part of my soul just kept clinging on.

I’d been lying on the ground, only the rags of an old red coat between me and the frozen earth. I hauled myself up to my elbows as he came in. It was then that I noticed another damnable detail. The guard wasn’t carrying a bowl. This time he wasn’t here to bring me food.

‘Now?’ I asked, hopeful.

‘I hate to do it to you, Falkland, but you’ll have to put your hands behind your back.’

It was difficult to stand. My legs were weaker than in that winter in Oxford when I was fixed with a splint. All the same I did as I was told. I faced the other way and he bound my wrists with coarse twine.

‘You’re still eating this filth?’ he said, kicking one of the bowls he’d left behind some time ago.

‘I’m afraid it will ruin my main course,’ I said, still facing the wall as he fiddled with my chains.

‘We haven’t starved that tongue of yours, then.’

He was right and I hated him for that. Whatever was left inside me that still wanted to live, it just couldn’t be knocked down.

‘Are you ready?’

I nodded and began to turn. ‘Don’t you want to put a sack over my head?’ I asked.

‘A sack?’

‘It’s the way it was before,’ I shrugged.

He led me to the door of the cell. After its constant gloom the world outside was blinding bright. I cringed. For what seemed to be the first time in long months the sun had broken through the snow clouds and its dazzling rays were reflected from deep mounds of white all around. I couldn’t see. ‘I’ve been here before,’ I said. ‘A sack over the head is the way these things work.’

‘Falkland, just keep your lips tight and walk.’

I walked uneasily but I had to keep moving because he was marching behind me, one massive stride for every two shuffles of mine. In that way we crossed the snow and came to the front of the farmhouse. Two camp guards stood outside the door as they had on the night I came to confront Fairfax. They stood aside as I stumbled on, though one of them at least had the dignity to look dissatisfied about it. He propped himself lazily on his pike and spat into the snow as we went through. The heat within hit me like a wave. In the hallway I didn’t know where the fires were burning but it rushed out to engulf me. After so long in the cell I felt smothered. The warmth didn’t reinvigorate me so much as make my body remember what it had been missing, making every last inch of me tingle.

I blundered to a halt.

‘Not now, Falkland,’ the guard said, propelling me forward with a hand in the small of my back. ‘On.’

I stumbled through broad doors into the hall where Fairfax had first received me. The room was as stark and empty as I’d last seen it. A great fire leapt and crackled in the hearth.

‘You won’t have to wait long,’ the guard said. He retreated back the way we’d come and closed the door behind him. I listened out to hear it lock but there was no sound. It didn’t matter. I was far beyond running now. I shuffled over and crouched at the fire. I wanted to hold my hands out in front and warm them but they were still tied behind my back and so I had to make do with basking in the glow like a grass snake on a rock. I’d been crouching there some time, taking a perverse delight in the way the heat made my body prickle, when I heard the door open. I didn’t bother to stand. I didn’t even look. I assumed it would be Fairfax, come to send me on my way.

‘That’s the way, Falkland,’ came a voice I found all too familiar. ‘Defiant to the end. If the King himself were to lead you to the top of a cliff and then demand that you didn’t jump off, you’d throw yourself straight onto the rocks below, wouldn’t you?’

I turned.

Cromwell had been different in London. Here he was dressed every inch the soldier: a madder red coat with white stylings, leather gauntlets and thick woollen trousers over which armoured tassets were fixed in place as if we were about to fight a battle.

‘You might act more pleased to see me, Falkland.’ He pulled out a dagger. ‘If I may?’

I nodded and turned my back to him. I didn’t flinch as he marched at me and brought the dagger down between my wrists, severing the twine. I brought my hands to the front of my body and massaged them in the fiery glow.

There was a long silence.

‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘When you sent me here – how much did you know?’

Cromwell raised an eyebrow. I knew he was toying with me as a cruel teacher toys with the stupidest boy in his school. I no longer cared.

‘I know you didn’t send me here because of the suicides. How could a man like you – even one who writes so many letters of condolence – care about a couple of dead cowards? You sent me because you knew. Didn’t you? Why are you even here? Why not simply let Fairfax hang me?’ I asked. ‘I’ve played my part. He’ll never bring Hopkins and all his endless Hells now; and there, I think, it could have ended. That’s what I would have done.’

‘Really?’ Cromwell looked at me hard. I hated the way the smile spread across his face. ‘Whereas I would think that a man with any sense to him wouldn’t let an asset like William Falkland down so easily. So here I am, not here
for
you perhaps, but here
because
of you. Black Tom wouldn’t have hanged you anyway. You’ve earned his respect, though not in a way that will ever have him call you his friend. But he has his honour, Falkland, whatever you might think of him. More so than your King.’

‘Miss Cain,’ I began, voice trembling. ‘What did you do to Miss Cain?’

‘She has a position in London now.’

‘And me?’ I hardly dared to ask.

Cromwell came forward, extended his arm and wrapped his long-fingered hand around my own. My fingers felt brittle and cold in his clasp and the gesture felt awkwardly uncomfortable. I could not say which of us liked it least, yet he didn’t quickly let go. ‘Might I beg another moment of your time, Falkland?’

I tried to tease my hand away but he was holding me fast. I was too weak.

‘We are about to embark on life in a very new world,’ he said. ‘The New Model will live on regardless of kings and ministers. There can be no disbanding any more. The army itself simply wouldn’t allow it.’

I managed to extricate my hand as a servant appeared with a bowl of broth and a tankard of what looked like cider. I was shocked to see that the broth had great hunks of meat floating in it – chicken, if I wasn’t mistaken. My stomach started to cry out. Damn it but even my gut was creeping onto Cromwell’s side. ‘What does it have to do with me?’ I asked.

‘You’ve shown your character, Falkland,’ he said. ‘You might do so again.’

I took a spoonful of broth into my mouth. It burned me from the inside and I spat it back into the bowl. ‘You promised me my freedom.’

‘And so free you are. Take care not to lose your way and you could be home by . . .’ For once Cromwell’s smile seemed real. ‘By Christ-tide, Falkland.’

‘Then I could ride out of here and never see a soldier again?’

Cromwell shrugged but there was something about his patient demeanour that sickened me. ‘If that’s what you want,’ he said. ‘But I fancy you’ll return after Christ-tide and serve us a little longer.’

‘And that’s it? Out of nowhere you come and I’m free to go?’

‘Yes, Falkland.’ He nodded. ‘You’re free to go. You have my thanks.’

‘For what?’ For the life of me, I could not see what I had done that mattered save to a few Catholic boys pressed against their will into an army that didn’t want them.

‘You’ve saved my army, Falkland, from a zealous purge that could have destroyed it. This war could yet have ground us down for years.’

I rather thought it already had. I put the bowl and tankard down in the hearth and made to march past him. ‘I’m done,’ I said. My eyes were suddenly aglaze. It must have been the soot and smoke stinging me and causing them to water. All I could see was my Caro, my boy John, my little Charlotte. Fairfax’s farmhouse had become a ghostly apparition around me. ‘I’ll find my own way from here.’

I was almost at the door when he called out. ‘I’ll see you soon enough, Falkland.’

I didn’t turn round, and whatever else he might have replied, I didn’t care to listen.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to my editors Ali Hope and Flora Rees. To Sarah Bance and Darcy Nicholson for the copy-editing and to the proofreaders and production team, whose names I’ve rarely known. A special thanks to my agent Robert Dinsdale and to Sam Childs, without whom William Falkland would not exist.

I’ve always had a penchant for the Hollywood noir of the forties and fifties, and if William Falkland evokes something of the Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe then that’s probably no coincidence. The setting lends itself well, I think.

If you liked this book and would like to read more of William Falkland, please say so. Loudly and to lots of people.