William Falkland 01 - The Royalist (7 page)

CHAPTER 7

When I was a soldier I was, for a time, a dragoon. Some of the men I rode with thought we were better than the King’s pikemen, better even than his horse, because we were the men sent out as sharp and swiftly as a crossbow bolt between the eyes. If we got word of some threat, or if we needed to launch an attack lightning fast, we’d saddle up and gallop out, dismounting to take up positions with muskets and sabres. Myself, I was never of the opinion that we were better than the rest. To me, we dragoons were simply jacks of all trades and masters of none. I would rather have held a pike, vicious, unwieldy weapons that they are. At least there is honesty in a pike.

It didn’t suit me well to be back in an army camp. I had, I supposed, grown used to my prison cell. More than that, I’d grown used to the idea that I was never going to see the light of day again. If Cromwell hadn’t come for me then I would have been on the gallows by now and all of this would have been over. Even in the comfort of Miss Cain’s home, a part of me wished it had gone the other way. As we went out, leaving the fractious Warbeck behind us, as I breathed in the smells – for there were horrible smells clinging like fog, even around the snowy streets of Crediton – I could remember exactly how it had been, my first winter in Yorkshire waiting for the wild Scots to appear across the moors. I did not much like the fear it struck in me, for as Miss Cain and I went into the night, I felt as small as a child crying in his cot to be cuddled by his mother. I’m ashamed to say that I’d cried that way once, a thirty-nine-year-old man with his mother already twenty years in the grave.

The snow had stopped again and the sky was partly clear, the air as sharp as cut glass. There must have been a bell tower in the church because I heard it ring for a change of watch. Ten bells. Later than I’d thought. As a soldier I’d hated the midnight watch. I was never a superstitious man – not even when I still believed in God – but it was during this watch that people believed foul creatures were abroad, the witching hour when diabolical things might happen. I wondered if it had been the midnight watch when those boys took their lives.

Miss Cain and I came on foot past the hanged man and across the northern end of Crediton. Where the streets petered out, another city of tents and wooden shelters rose up. Two watchmen sat on upturned buckets, huddled and rubbing their hands around a small fire. They barely glanced at us as we passed and made no attempt to offer a challenge. I wondered if they knew Miss Cain by sight; although wrapped as we were with our cloaks pulled tight around us I wondered how they might know us at all.

Main Street broadened and then disappeared. The snow at this end of the town was thicker and I felt the bite of the wind. We walked along trails that the soldiers themselves had carved and rolled. It was a thing of monstrous industry, this New Model Army. The bands I’d fought in were of a hundred men, but here the companies must have been a thousand strong and more. The New Model, it seemed, was less an army than it was a city that could move. Even under the blankets of snow I could see the way the tents had been erected as if according to a map of streets. Fires were built at exact intervals between them. A thin trail led to the latrines. Here and there men paced up and down, warding off the chill as they kept watch.

A thought occurred to me. I remembered the man hanging from the chestnut tree. ‘Miss Cain, how many women are left in Crediton?’

Her eyes flashed in the darkness. ‘You mean whores.’

‘No, I do not.’

Miss Cain trudged on through the snow in silence. The further we went the less ordered the camp became, as if even the strict whips of Cromwell and Fairfax could only reach so far. The tents were no longer laid out according to a pattern but grew up haphazardly, a little like weeds sneaking in to take over a perfectly laid bed of flowers. They were sparser too and I fancied that some of the soldiers had struck out here to be as far from the drills and discipline of their commanders as they could. In one field I saw, quite distinct from the rest, a circle of tents standing in the shelter of a ruined barn. An enormous fire had been stoked underneath the stone and still burned bright even in spite of the snow. Although here and there men paced back and forth casting an illusion of watchfulness, we were not challenged once nor, I dare say, even noticed. I wondered what Fairfax would say to that if he knew; but then, what threat could there be to such a vast encampment as this? If I was to believe Warbeck then the King’s men were done for in this part of England, reduced to a few roving bands and skeletal garrisons that would doubtless melt away at the first whisper of the New Model on the march.

‘As soon as we knew they were coming, a lot of us left,’ said Miss Cain at last. ‘If you had relations in Exeter, that’s where you went. My neighbours went to a farm in Dorset, though it was a perilous journey. I heard some tried to get to London.’

‘Straight into Parliament’s hands?’

‘The people here don’t care for Parliaments or Kings, Mr Falkland. They just want to see the spring.’

‘Yet, Miss Cain,
you
stayed.’

‘Would that we had not. I begged and I begged but my father was a stubborn fool. He wouldn’t leave the town he’s known all his life. Until . . .’

She fell silent and stopped. I told her she didn’t have to go on but she shook her head.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’d have you hear it, what monsters you’re bound to. When the army moved in, they took every spare room they could find. If they didn’t drive people straight from their homes, it was only to displace them by fouler means. When my father and brother would not give up their own shelter for housing soldiers, they had a cruel trick. They pressed them into serving for the New Model and gave them such a lowly rank that they would have to sleep wild in the fields, worse than cattle.’

I remembered how slyly Fairfax had spoken to her. ‘That was why they
deserted
.’

‘Yes,’ she said. Her voice trembled not with fear or cold but with an anger hungry for revenge. ‘But never has the word been used with less just cause.’

We reached the very edge of the encampment where the frozen river ran. All around us was stark white and black with nothing in between. All the same, I knew there would be men out there, keeping watch along every trail and track leading from the town. I looked around and tried to see the lie of the land, looking for the points I’d have chosen if this monster was my own to command. I could hardly see a hillside, only the endless rolling white.

Some way out from the centre of Crediton, an acre from the bank of the river, stood an old oak like a giant taloned hand clawing out of the white earth. Its branches were topped with a crown of ice but against the white hills it stood out like a burn. On one side there was an entangled mess of branches large and small. On the other, only a single bough protruded, nearly as thick as the trunk itself. Miss Cain pointed to it. ‘There.’

‘You do not have to approach,’ I said, thinking her superstitious.

‘You’d leave me here?’

I looked around at the desolate cold and the scattered camp full of soldiers. ‘You have a fair argument.’

We stepped off the trail and at once the snow reached above our boots. We crossed the field and plunged in drifts as high as our knees. I went first so as to blaze a path for Miss Cain to follow. In this way it took us half an hour to cross an acre of ground. The exertion, at least, kept the cold at bay. A hundred yards short of the oak we stopped and the tree seemed as tall as the distance between us. It was a true colossus.

The single bough drew my eye. It was perhaps fifteen feet off the ground, well over twice my height, and the end of a rope still hung from halfway along. These, I decided, had been brave boys. I’d known men take a dagger to their wrists or drink a sleeping draught laced with nightshade, but those were things that could be done in the blink of an eye. These boys had first had to scale the tree – no mean feat in itself, for the first hand-hold was not until two feet above my head – and then crawl out along that branch and tie a rope around their necks before they made the long, lonesome jump.

As we drew close, the snow underfoot grew shallower, much of it caught in the branches above. I circled the tree, though I couldn’t say what it was I hoped to find. Miss Cain followed three paces behind. The night was bitter now and she wrapped her arms around herself.

‘You’ll catch your death,’ I said.

‘Your jests are in the poorest taste, Master Falkland.’

I’d secretly known all along that I’d find nothing of note. The snow had fallen so deep that I might have been walking on fresh graves and I wouldn’t have known it. Still, something compelled me. I wanted to get a closer look. ‘Miss Cain,’ I said, ‘you would do well to stand back.’

I was fortunate that the snow had piled drifts against the trunk. Once compacted underfoot it made for a good stool and, in that way, I was able to reach the first hand-hold in the bark and haul myself onto the lowest branch on the side opposite the one from which the boys had jumped. Miss Cain cried out a warning but I told her to be calm and keep talking; I wanted the comfort of her voice calling out to me in the dark. I didn’t like to admit it but I knew, suddenly, that I was not a young man any more. A cramp seized my leg and told me I should retreat but I refused to listen. It was an ungainly scramble, one I was glad nobody else could see, but I climbed higher and shimmied around the trunk to reach the hanging branch. With my legs wrapped around the ice cold bough I inched my way out to the rope. I reeled it in. The end was frayed where the last boy had been cut down. There were no ropes for the two boys before that, so they must have been brought in. Somebody was getting lazy.

I took out my dagger and began to cut, but the rope was frozen solid and I might as well have been trying to drive a darning needle through plate armour. From atop the branch I could see for miles. Crediton was just a little town with an implausible number of fires dotted around. Perhaps Miss Cain’s cinnamon-spiced wine still lingered in my memory for I found myself thinking of Christmas once more – if there was ever to be a Christmas again. I imagined Crediton would be a peaceful place to spend it once the army was gone.

I didn’t have the heart to scramble back through the branches so I lowered myself to hang under the branch, clinging to the rope. In that way I had a terrible flash of the boys’ last moments. Only when I let go, I did not dangle but dropped and rolled in the snow. It was further than it seemed and I landed hard; it knocked the wind out of me and I suppose I was lucky not to do myself an injury. When I didn’t immediately rise, Miss Cain rushed over.

‘It was further than I reckoned,’ I gasped, staggering to my feet with the help of her hand and struggling for breath. My back was jarred but nothing more; nevertheless I made a solemn vow that in future I would act my age.

‘I tried to tell you, sir. It’s because of the granadoe.’

I stood back and scrutinised the land with eyes half squinting. It was difficult to tell because of the way the snow had fallen but Miss Cain was correct: there was a depression in the earth. I kicked away some of the snow and could even see where portions of the tree’s roots, as thick and gnarled as the branches, had been exposed at the bottom of a shallow crater. Here was where the fourth boy had met his end, right underneath that rope. A granadoe is a terrible thing. I’d seen them deployed on several occasions. They were little more than balls of gunpowder, tightly compacted and encased in a shell of pottery. There wasn’t a single soldier I’d known who didn’t fear them. More often than not the things would ignite before they could be bowled at the enemy. Half of the crippled beggars haunting London’s streets had once been soldiers using these new weapons of war.

‘Tell me all you know,’ I said.

‘It was three nights ago. I didn’t know until morning. He was a boy from the store rooms. They’re using the crypt underneath the church. They said it didn’t matter if there was an accident and the church was demolished because then the village would be more godly. But it was only an excuse – there are no papists in Crediton, Master Falkland. There never have been.’

I thought of the rosary I’d picked up from the snow only hours before. ‘And the boy?’

‘His name was Thomas. He had hair so blond it was almost white. That’s why they called him White Tom, in mockery of Fairfax. He was one of ours, Master Falkland. They pressed him as soon as they came into the village – and he a boy of only sixteen.’

‘Came down here and threw himself on a granadoe?’

‘Lit it first.’

I looked at the dangling rope. ‘Why here?’

‘Why anywhere, sir? He was sixteen, a soft boy, a sweet boy. Not a boy to be a soldier. Yet soldier he was. And now . . .’

I stood in the exact spot where four boys had taken their lives and tried to breathe it in. I was too late for clues. I was too late for doing anything but probing and prodding and hazarding my best guess. I told myself I didn’t care, that I was only here because – like White Tom – I’d been pressed into service in the New Model Army. But their ghosts were all around me and I knew, suddenly, that I
wanted
to know, that I
needed
to know, that whatever had happened to those boys they deserved their stories to be told. I knew what it was like to be a faceless soul in an engine of war. I owed it to them to lay their ghosts to rest. I owed it to myself.

‘Miss Cain?’ Another thought had come nagging, something that had troubled me since Warbeck and I first entered the camp. ‘When I came to your door, when you saw me, before Fairfax told you who I was, who did you
think
I was?’

Miss Cain shook her head. ‘I don’t understand you, sir,’ she said, but I saw I’d struck a chord.

‘You looked at me as though I was the devil himself. And you’re not the first.’ Though I remembered there had been others whose look had been far different, as though I was a saint.