William Falkland 01 - The Royalist (8 page)

Miss Cain shuddered and looked away. ‘There were whispers,’ she said, ‘of an inquisitor of some ilk and his assistant come to make this monstrous army clean. To make it pure and godly, whatever that word has come to mean. I thought perhaps that you and your . . .’ She shrugged. ‘Someone come to hunt after whores and Catholics and witches and any others to whom
godly
men might take offence. I think, sir, you know of what I speak.’

I remembered the bonfire I’d seen as I left London with its effigy of the pope and thought perhaps I did. I turned and was about to take Miss Cain by the arm and begin the journey back into Crediton when I saw something move at the head of the field. It was almost imperceptible, a black flash against the white land, but then it stopped and I was certain. A scrawny stick of a man was watching us from a ridge between here and the edge of the town. I stared back and wondered if he was staring at me. At this distance we could neither of us know the other. I stared all the same. Then he moved again and was gone.

CHAPTER 8

In the morning Miss Cain brought me pottage and dark beer. I ate it on the doorstep with Warbeck. I’d expected him to ask me about my excursion in the night and rain dire warnings over my head – it would have been simple enough to have continued and walked right on out of the camp after all. But he said nothing. Perhaps he understood as I did that in the cold I’d be lucky to find shelter before I froze; or perhaps he’d been the man I saw watching us by the oak. As it was he barely spoke three words, and all of them to Miss Cain, before he was gone about some business of his own.

I had in mind to visit the church and see for myself where this store of powder and pottery was kept, but before I could go, a stout fellow appeared on the step. He wasn’t short enough to be considered a dwarf but I imagined he might have heard the insult more than once. His beard was thick and hid a collection of little scars underneath, as of a man pushed head first through glass. One of his ears had had a bite taken out of it, but it was an old injury and long healed. His face was wrinkled and dark from a life out under the sky, his cheeks and nose rosy from cold or wine. His eyebrows struck me most – huge and bushy like great hairy caterpillars. The eyes beneath them held mine and I found I couldn’t make anything of him – he could have been a fool or a murderer for all I could tell. He was not, I thought, the most wholesome of men to look at. He begged my pardon and introduced himself as Alfred Purkiss.

‘I am sent,’ he said, puffing himself up, ‘from Black Tom hisself. I’m to take you to the spot.’

‘The spot?’

He bent in and I thought for a second that he might bow. The way Cromwell would have the world ordered, lords should bow at commoners, and so it came as no great surprise; but I had misjudged him. He wanted only to take me in his confidence. ‘The witching tree, sir.’

He meant the tree where the boys had hanged and the granadoe exploded. ‘Please don’t trouble,’ I said, biting on an end of dry bread. ‘I visited the tree last night. There was nothing I could see.’

He nodded knowingly as if I was returning his confidence and telling him secrets. ‘Because of the night,’ he whispered.

So Fairfax had delivered me a simpleton. ‘And the snow,’ I said.

I jumped to my feet and retreated into the house, leaving this Purkiss in the street. Inside, Miss Cain busied herself stoking a fire. She had risen earlier than me to collect snow for the pot and a thin, watery soup was already simmering for later in the day. In her presence I felt foolish and awkward. In part I felt an imposition, in part I knew that Warbeck and I saved her from one far greater. I had no doubt, too, that I had received far more amiable company in our walk to and from the tree than I would from Purkiss. ‘I thank you for your kind hospitality,’ I said.

She gave me a look I couldn’t decipher, annoyed and nervous and weary and hopeful all at once.

‘I’m grateful for your assistance, Miss Cain,’ I added. I waited a moment but she returned to her pot and I understood that she wished me to leave.

I returned to Purkiss then and took off along the street, marking my way by the shapes I’d seen the night before, passing the warped whitewashed walls of the houses with their little windows and sharply pointed rooftops. Although the air was still icy, the sky was clear and the thin November sun still carried a little warmth. Men sat on the doorsteps in front of open doors or leaning against the walls, some of them with their hands cupped around steaming cups of soup or bowls of pottage. They glanced at us as we passed but with little interest, even in poor Purkiss who plodded after me, dragging his left leg behind him. I had some pity for that; had the King’s surgeons been less practised then I too might have been walking with such a gait. Other men gathered and pressed snow into buckets for water or else hurried away with stinking pails of slurry, off to the latrine pits. Without a horse and Fairfax beside me, they paid me no heed. The air wafting from the houses smelled stale and rank, of too many men crushed together and of smoke from warm hearths. I shook my head at that. Winters were long and we were only at the beginning. These men would regret their cosy November mornings in the freezing heart of January. I was glad I would be gone long before then.

Around the desecrated market cross some young soldiers were clearing snow. They watched me as I passed. It couldn’t have been because they hadn’t seen me before, for the army was so enormous that any fellow soldier might easily seem a stranger and I’d passed a hundred men already who couldn’t possibly recognise me and yet hadn’t cared a hoot. A little way past them I waited while Purkiss caught up. ‘Do you know those men?’ I asked him, but he only shrugged and shook his head and then looked up at me, blank and vacant.

A little further down the road I reached Crediton church. In the daylight it appeared less imposing than it had the night before. The steeple seemed to burst out of a great mound of snow into which a great oak door and stained glass windows were set. One of the windows had been smashed but the others remained intact. It was the work of lazy Puritans – a more zealous man would have put out all the windows and made a mockery of the pieces. Truly godly men, I thought, might have left all well alone.

I’d lost track of the days but I knew it wasn’t Sunday, and yet I wasn’t the first to church that morning. A single pair of boots had already tramped a path through the thick virgin snow. They led from the south end of the town where Fairfax and the other commanders quartered and where the cavalry horses were corralled. I wondered if it was a New Modeller roaming around inside and what that might mean, but there was only one way to find out. Cromwell had promised me my run of the camp and I meant to find out how closely his words would be kept.

I told Purkiss to wait for me outside and went to the door. As I quietly slipped in, I felt that rush of peacefulness that no man, no matter what he is, can deny. It had been a long time since I’d prayed, longer still – you will think me a hypocrite – since I believed there was anybody up there to pray to, but I found myself thinking of old services and I smiled. I’d enjoyed church as a boy. I have no voice but I liked the hymns, how a hundred voices soared together to create an entirely different sound. Here, though, the only sounds were the heavy echoes of my footsteps as I walked between rows of simple wooden pews. There was no altar in the chancel and I imagined that there had been no Mass here since my grandfather’s age. If I was right then the stained glass windows were an aberration, an oversight – or perhaps the wistful indulgence of a priest harking back to better times.

At the front of the chancel were two doors. The one on the left led to a smaller chamber that might once have been a confessional – I wasn’t sure. The other opened to a stairway going down. I followed it, making certain my steps were loud. Whoever was lurking below, I didn’t want them to think me an intruder. I had, after all, been told this place was sitting on a nest of gunpowder.

The stairs turned and turned again and I thought I heard footsteps other than my own. At the second turn I held my foot back but the footsteps continued, and before I could call out a man appeared and almost barrelled into me. Startled, he jumped back and had to hold onto the wall to stop himself from tumbling. He clutched his chest with a theatrical flourish, miming how his heart had raced. He was a scrawny thing, dressed all in black. I judged him about seventy years old. His hair – what was left – was white and stained yellow at the ends. A big nose, broken in two places and never set, was squashed into the middle of a face that had lost so much weight that he made me think of my fellows in Newgate. Cheekbones poked through sallow skin.

‘I . . . I’m . . . Sir, I b-beg, forgive me.’ I’d expected anger, not apologies, but this old man looked as if, had there been room on the step, he might have dropped to his knees and grovelled. ‘I only . . . meant to . . . to take a look.’

‘A look?’ I decided to let the lie unravel. I had, I now thought, disturbed an intruder in the act and I needed a stroke of fortune if I was to get anywhere with this investigation. There was always the niggling feeling that if I didn’t get anywhere, then Cromwell would see me back in irons.

‘Please, sir. I kn-know what I was told – I should stay away – but I . . . it was a . . . moment of weakness. Pitiable, poor human weakness! We are all unworthy creatures, sir. Ev-every last one of us.’ His head was hanging down but he risked a look up with a single rolling eye, assaying me for any hint of sympathy.

‘Every last one?’

‘S-some, sir, are weaker than . . . others.’ He was taking me for a fool. I had, of course, been a flatterer in my lifetime but I had rarely been flattered myself. It was as well. I didn’t have a taste for it. ‘You . . . would not tell?’ he asked hopefully.

He was trying to reel me in. I decided I would let him. ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘But sir . . .’ he whispered. ‘This is my church.’ He must have noted the look of surprise on my face, an involuntary twitching of the eyebrows, and taken it for anger, for no sooner had he spoken the words than he threw a hand to his mouth, cringed and scuttled two steps back down the stairs. ‘B-beg pardon,’ he squealed. ‘This is Black Tom’s church, of . . . of course. I was only its –’ he tried desperately to grab the right word – ‘keeper. An . . . honoured . . . keeper.’

I took a step down and then another, slow and firm, and in that way forced him to the bottom of the stairs ahead of me. We stood in a narrow hall so low I could not stand straight and had to stoop. The scrawny man was shorter than the ceiling by three or four inches, but he still bowed his head to his chest like a hunchback or a man who has spent his life buried in books. ‘You’re the priest?’ I asked.

He gave me a look like an inquisitive greyhound.

‘Save it,’ I said. ‘I’m not with the New Model. I was sent here because of the suicides.’

‘You’re the intelligencer!’ His relief was palpable. He breathed more easily now and even stood straighter. I’d been right: his cringing had been only an act. I’ve noticed in my time how you will often find that a man of God is the best actor of all.

‘I was told they were using the church as a store.’

The priest nodded. ‘They . . . desecrate God’s house in this manner. And all for a . . . piece of stained glass! They called it a devil’s chapel, me a whoreson. They . . . do it out of mockery.’

‘Did you give the Mass?’

The priest opened his lips but quickly shut them again. ‘It has not been allowed in my lifetime, sir.’

That was answer enough. I thought again of the rosary I still carried in my pocket, plucked last night from the snow. ‘I would see the stores, if you would,’ I said. ‘The gunpowder. The granadoes.’

The old priest beckoned me along the passage. Now that he was sure I was not here to scold him, he didn’t walk like the wizened old man who’d met me on the stair. It took twenty years off his age and I saw him suddenly for just another victim of these wars, no matter how foolish his notions of godliness. At the end of the passage we passed through a door into what had once been wine cellars. There were no racks or bottles on display but the smell was unmistakable. I wondered when they had been raided and fancied it had been before the New Model arrived. There was probably a stash somewhere. Perhaps that – and not love for his forsaken church – was why the priest had sneaked back in; but now the walls were stacked high with wooden barrels. I knew what they were without having to look. Once you’ve manned artillery or held a musket you don’t forget the smell of powder. I made a show of inspecting them.

‘Who looks over it?’ I asked.

‘There is a storekeeper.’

‘Who is he?’

The priest shook his head sadly. ‘I am not with . . . the New Model, sir.’

I walked the length of the cellar. At the end was a trapdoor. I knelt and fingered the latch. There was a thin coating of powder everywhere and, beneath that, dust. The dust had been disturbed, but long before the powder had had a chance to settle. ‘The crypts?’ I asked.

‘It is . . . only . . . the dead,’ he replied. That stutter must not have been part of the act.

‘You’re in charge of the dead?’

Again the priest shook his head. ‘The army looks . . . after its own.’

‘What about the dead boys? The ones who hung themselves? And the other . . .’

The priest shuddered. ‘You would not want to see
him
, sir. He was in . . . pieces.’

‘I’ve seen it before.’

‘Are you a soldier, sir, as well as a . . . a . . . an intelligencer?’

I brushed past him on the way back to the stairway. The stench of powder and wine was too much and I wanted to retch. It was best that I did not, as the pottage I’d had for breakfast was likely my only meal of the day. ‘Would you take me to the bodies?’ I asked.

He scuttled after me and up the stairs. ‘They are army graves, sir.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘There is . . . only one. One grave. And . . . it has many bodies.’

I was glad he was behind me then so he couldn’t see my face. Even on the road with the King we gave our boys proper burials. Had the New Model been marching and taking casualties along the way then perhaps I could have understood. But this was less a winter camp than it was a winter city. They’d built their own roads, their own houses, latrines, stores, grounds for drilling. Why, in all this industry, could they not build their own graveyards as well, something to honour their dead? The only reason I could find was that it wasn’t practical: that a man’s hours could be put to better use than in digging individual graves. This New Model was indeed a calculating monster. I’d seen how efficient they were on the battlefield at Naseby, how Cromwell’s cavalry were so disciplined they didn’t chase retreating men but turned and took formation and charged again. Now I was seeing how efficient they were off the battlefield as well. But this was a cold thing, unworthy of an army forged in the name of even a puritan God.

‘Take me there,’ I said. We were standing in the chancel again. A bitter wind came in through the shattered glass. As I walked to the door I stopped: Purkiss was where I’d left him but now he had three men clustered around him. I thought at first they were threatening him but it was only his diminutive stature that had them looming over. He was talking with quite some animation. I squinted and thought perhaps the three men were the ones who had watched us so intently in the market square. I crept forward to look closer before they saw me in their turn but as I did the priest caught my arm.