Captain Fantom

by Reginald Hill

  He gave an emphatic thrust with his stick and extinguished the last flame.

  ‘Come back to my tent, Carlo,’ he said. ‘I have invited all my senior officers to gather there.’

  I agreed readily. I could do with a bone to chew on, and a glass of wine. But as we crackled our way through the frosty undergrowth, he disenchanted me by saying, ‘Aye, ’tis good for God’s soldiers to pray together before a battle,’ and my heart sank even further when, pushing me ahead of him into his tent, he announced cheerily to those assembled there, ‘Fantom says it will all be over by Christmas.’

  I will say little of the battle. I was with Sir James Ramsay who commanded the cavalry on the left wing to such effect that later he was tried for dereliction of duty by a council of war. He was found not guilty, and so he was not, if a commander be not responsible for the way his men comport themselves. I fought as long as I saw cause, but when our line broke under the Royalist charge and our men turned and fled, I too rode away. The chase I saw ranged far over the countryside (which was to our advantage also, for the pursuers were as far removed from the battle as the pursued) but I was able to escape this ignominy by courtesy of Petrarch whom I was riding that day.

  As with all my horses, I had early trained him to jump which was something omitted from the schooling of most cavalry mounts of the time. All horses will jump in a pinch, but some ‘experts’ felt that a trained jumper would tend to try to leap over infantry lines, thus exposing the belly, rather than crashing through, which is much more forceful and devastating. Myself, I feel that any horse which runs or jumps of its own will cannot be described as ‘trained’. I am not satisfied till my own mounts will take a six foot gate and a seven foot hedge without a qualm. Usually I find that such a barrier is enough to deter nearly all pursuers so I never have to run far. On this occasion, one fool came crashing through the hedge behind me but, as is my custom, I brought Petrarch to a stop and turned him as soon as we had landed, so I blew the young fool’s brains out and caught his reins as he fell. The beast was a fine black stallion which would have done credit to a royal stable. Indeed I wondered if I had completed what I had nearly done four years earlier at Vlotho on the Weser when I had fired at Prince Rupert. He it was, so our intelligences reported, who led the King’s cavalry that day. But when I returned to take another look at the stallion’s rider, I decided that neither five years nor even a shattered temple could change a man that much.

  But this was no time for reflections on mutability. I was in a small area of peace and tranquillity but all around me the battle was joined and my pay was still to earn. I picketed the stallion in a small copse, doubting much that he would remain undiscovered till the end of the day, and set about reorganizing some kind of formation on the left flank which Rupert’s charge had left totally exposed.

  Many men have written that it is impossible to know more of how a battle goes than what befalls in the circle of your own eyes. Such men perhaps cannot tell if a storm approaches till they feel the rain or whether a building is a church or a bawdy-house till they enter the door. A battle is movement and noise; I watched and listened and felt. Above all, the trick is to be able to recognize that sense of emptiness at the centre which means your leaders have been overrun, or withdrawn. Then the professional’s wages have all been earned and he is free to retire.

  Well, we were in dire straits on the left, but there was still strength in reserve. The greatest danger was panic and the assumption of defeat. A trooper on a badly wounded horse came blundering through the smoke crying, ‘Flee! Flee! We are lost! The General is taken!’

  I shot his horse from under him and caught him by his shoulder as he fell. He was only a boy, pale as a Polack’s paps with fear.

  ‘Boy,’ I said sternly. ‘Dost believe in God?’

  ‘Aye, most truly,’ he gasped.

  ‘That is sad, boy,’ I said. ‘For your feet dangle in a bottomless vat full of devil shit which, if I once let you go, will suck you out of God’s grace for ever.’

  He shrieked as I urged Petrarch forward and his legs dragged and bubbled through the hot entrails of a gutted horse.

  ‘You have one chance,’ I said. ‘See, through yon hedge, there, in that wood you will find a horse. Mount him and return to me within the quarter-hour, else Satan’s teeth will sink most excrutiatingly into your scrotum. Go!’

  He ran like a peppered ferret and I laughed to see it. Sir James Ramsay happening near at that moment cried, ‘For God, Fantom, what is there here for any but the devil’s spawn to laugh at?’

  ‘Keep your faith, Sir James,’ I reproached him sternly. ‘And God will keep his faithful.’

  I had been around Essex long enough to pick up a good line in this Puritan cant. As I spoke, there came a change in the din which arose from the battlefield. Ramsay noticed it too but could not isolate it.

  ‘It’s the King’s guns,’ I explained to him. ‘They have stopped firing.’

  It was Balfour, I later discovered, who had led the attack which silenced the guns and so gave our infantry heart to continue the struggle. Thank God for professionals!

  Naturally many of our side were made as certain of victory by this as Rupert’s charge had made them of defeat. The young trooper returned on the black stallion (he rode well I was pleased to see) and was as flushed with ardour to fight as before he had been pale with terror. I held his reins to prevent him galloping off towards the enemy lines.

  ‘Boy,’ I said, ‘that horse is mine. Any wound it receives I will redouble on your own hide. Now, keep close to me and protect my back.’

  Well, that is all that needs to be told. When darkness fell, no one had won. Both sides camped in the field, claiming possession thereof. It was bitterly cold, that I do remember. I made the boy trooper, whose name was Christopher Allen, lie with me in my cloak. I think he feared my lust at first, but all I wanted was his heat and with a fire at one side and Christopher at the other, I kept tolerably warm. The following day we withdrew towards Warwick, being harassed all the way by Rupert’s cavalry. I suppose on balance the King’s men had the better of it, but what cared I? I had earned my pay and I was alive to spend it. As we moved along the road, I started to sing a song recalled from my youth. It tells a singularly obscene tale of a princess who is held in a castle by a giant with four cocks. But the tune has a stately catchiness, like one of the livelier Protestant hymns, and soon all around me the men were la-la-ing the chorus or even imitating the strange words.

  Essex, as he rode along the line, smiled approvingly and I sang the louder. Suddenly I felt optimistic. It had struck me that all the smart operators would be with the King, which meant that in a sense I had a cash monopoly with the Parliamentarians. For the first time in my life, I resolved to come out of the war stinking rich.

  1642–3

  London – Winchester

  I was in London in November. Essex may not have managed the army with complete success at Edgehill, but his strategy in reporting the battle in London could not be faulted and he was received as a hero. Parliament voted him £5000 in recognition of his services. What in God’s name would he find to spend it on? I wondered.

  All I got out of the battle were my wages and the black stallion, in whose saddle-pouch I found matters ofinterest but little value. First a roll of two or three love letters which addressed him as ‘my most sweetest Daffyd’ and were signed ‘your ever-loving, ever-longing wife, Annette’, and what lay in between promised such a wealth of carnal delight on his return that I was shocked a lady should know such terms. I thought of the poor bastard having his eyes picked out by hungry crows, hoped his wife would find someone worthy to console her, and put those hot letters into the scarcely hotter fire. But I kept the other object which ‘most sweetest Daffyd’ had seen fit to bear with him into battle, a lady’s ring with an amethyst set in tin. My researches into Wallenstein’s idiotic belief’s recalled to me that this was a talisman to attract the influence of Jupiter which was especially valuable in gain
ing wealth, health, position or friendship.

  ‘You are a fake, ring,’ I said rhetorically, but later I remembered that Jupiter could also be useful in helping a man become invisible, so perhaps the ring had worked after all! It is by such ambiguities that these soothsayers and magicians control the minds of the gullible!

  In London I had found comfortable lodgings close by Drury Lane. With me was Christopher Allen whose services as orderly I had begged from his company commander when I saw how skilfully he cared for horses. He was a pleasant lad of a well-to-do seed merchant’s family in Norwich. He had run away from home, intending to enlist with the King’s army, but having in error made contact first with the Parliamentarians he was wise enough not to admit his mistake, but to accept the pushings of fate, for the time being at least. It was this lack of soul-searing commitment which appealed to me most. His motivation was a lively curiosity and a kind of contrariness which made him seek that which was most denied him. For instance, having recognized that I had no desire to sodomize with him, he began to try to rouse my lust and when I called him he would come as if from his bed naked or but lightly clothed. I smiled to myself at his pride in his fair unblemished skin and would throw open a window so that he stood and shivered in a wintry blast while he listened to my slow instructions. Eventually he started coming to me in shirt and breeches.

  But the sight of his body though it did not rouse me made me think of my own and it came to me oddly that though I was twice his age and more, my flesh was as unblemished as his. For a priest or a soft-living courtier this may seem no oddity, but for one in my profession it was near miraculous. I had been struck with steel and bullets enough, yet none had left their mark. And into my mind again came those old stories from my native land of hard-men, recalled to me in the Saxon forests by that villain, Josip. His store of dried leaves had by now run out but since my arrival in England I had noted a common enough plant (of the family saxifraga so one of my acquaintances told me) whose leaves, appearing similarly shaped though rather smaller, I had first dried and then infused, finding to my pleasure the taste very like that of my Croatian brew to which I confess I had become as addicted as Essex to his pipe. Could there perhaps be some truth in the old stories? I took my pistol in my hand and stood before a mirror. There was only one way to test the tale and the proof could be more painful than the uncertainty. What an absurd old fool I was getting, I thought with a grin. This is a true mark of age, to start dreaming of immortality.

  Suddenly I was seized from behind and my arms pinned by my side in a strong embrace.

  ‘Captain! Captain! Be strong and take heed of your soul, I beg thee!’

  It was Christopher, I realized, fervid to save me from self destruction!’

  I was half amused, half angry, the amusement growing less as I wrestled in vain to break his grip. Finally I relaxed.

  ‘It is well,’ I gasped. ‘The devil has left me.’

  He slackened his hold, I spun round, kneed him gently in the groin and as he groaned in pain, I flung him face down on the bed which silenced him and buggered him most roughly till he cried out loud again.

  ‘That is how it is, lad,’ I said grimly as I dressed. ‘Perhaps now you will be industrious to watch over my stable and let my body and my soul fend for themselves.’

  I left the house angrily, but my anger was with myself. Women I had decided were put in my way by divine will with which no man should quarrel, but what I had just done I had chosen to do and I was sorry for it.

  I sat down in the Horseshoe Tavern and ordered a flagon of wine. When that was done, I ordered another and after that I felt it best to seek my bed.

  As I stood outside the door, breathing deep of what passes for fresh air in a large city, a sound penetrated my reeling head, a melodious tinkling noise putting me in mind of the goats I once herded as an innocent boy. For a moment I was back in that childhood scene. Then the noise grew louder. I turned. Approaching me wearing the uniform of a Lieutenant of Horse, his boots weighed down by great jingling spurs, was another vision from the past.

  ‘D’Amblève!’ I shrieked and drew my sword.

  I would have thrust through him before he had time to draw, but the drink made me stumble and next thing his steel was in his hand and running at my chest. I felt my tunic part and I stepped back before the force of the blow. But he might as well have blunted his sword on the tavern wall. I parried, passed at his head, checked, withdrew, and gave him the point through his heart.

  He sighed like a girl in love and tumbled over into the frozen kennel. I peered down at him, eager to make certain of his death. The moon glinted back off his spurs, off the ice which his fall had splintered into temporary diamonds, and off his pale, surprised face.

  It wasn’t D’Amblève. It was a young man I had never seen before in my life.

  Sobered suddenly and completely, I sheathed my weapon and fled. There were no witnesses, or none that would do more than rob the corpse when I was gone. What a day’s work was here! I had bestialized one young man and murdered another. And yet there were days in my past more soaked with blood than this, days when the dead were past counting and the ravished far more innocent than young Christopher. Was I growing a conscience in my age? I wondered uneasily. Perhaps I was too much in the company of these sodding Puritans! Their cant must be contagious. I awoke next morning, resolved to seek a cure even if it meant the moral equivalent of standing in a steam-barrel in the spital.

  Essex sent for me that day. The King’s army was to the west of the capital, threatening Brentford, and Essex’s army reinforced by the London Trained Bands was preparing to march towards them. It was goodbye to the hope of peace which had followed the near stalemate of Edgehill, though with Pym totally committed to the overthrow by arms of the Royalists, the fabric of hope had always been so threadbare that it would have burst under a nun’s fart,

  I was not to go with the army, Essex instructed, but to go to the south country, ostensibly with missives for various vacillating townships; but when I protested that as a foreigner it was not to be expected that I should find my way around with ease or be listened to with enthusiasm, it became clear that my real function was to oversee the activities of Sir William Waller, whose rivalry with Essex, though not yet of the mature proportions it came to achieve, was already a hearty infant. At first I demurred. Though astute and observant enough in my own self-interest, and willing to practise deception where this will best serve it, I have little taste for spying, that is, passing what I know of one master to another for reward. But Essex, blunt honest Essex, had been so oblique in his suggestions that he was able to be offended at what he called my implications though we both knew well enough what he meant.

  So I joined Waller, a short stout man and, like many of that build, of considerable fieriness as though to compensate for his lack of inches. He had fought in the German wars some twenty years earlier and though we had never met, some warped rumour of my career had reached him, and perhaps because of this or my present association with Essex, I was greeted with much coolness.

  I, for my part, bore Sir William no ill feeling, but I could not look with favour on the force under his command, which consisted in the main of dragoons. A true cavalry man would almost as lief be a pioneer as a dragoon, or at least such as dragoons were wont to be before the army was reformed. These had mounts which bore the name of horses as alders are called trees; skinny stunted things, scarce able to take a man’s weight. My heart sank the more when I saw they were armed with match-locks. These were often as dangerous to one’s allies as to the enemy. A stray spark could set off a musket beforetimes and wound a comrade placed ahead; or set fire to a charge in a man’s bandolier, tearing him to pieces as his other charges ignited; or worse still (and this I had seen as recently as Edgehill) ignite the powder in the budge-barrel, blowing up all those who stood around it. Dragoons were merely mounted infantry, it is true, but with match-locks the option of firing from horseback was entirely removed.

&nbs
p; Let it not be thought that I am simply prejudiced against all arms of the military service save the cavalry. Without foot soldiers there could be no army, and to use horses to move foot soldiers quickly from one area to another makes excellent sense. Wallenstein used to send dragoons ahead with shovels and matlocks to level the way and make good the passes – in a sense, as mounted pioneers. But possession of a horse can give an infantryman ideas above his station. Even these broken ‘nags’, as they are called, will bear a man further and faster in his search for pillage, and then allow him to carry away a great deal more. So, much energy was wasted, much indiscipline engendered (and, incidentally, much booty, properly the perquisite of cavalrymen, stolen) by these socalled dragoons. Because of this, in France dragoons as a corps of their armies almost disappeared altogether. Now, the circumstances of war in England were very different from those on the Continent, the quarrel more clear-cut, the area less diffuse. Yet these dragoons still had to me something of the look of those wild men I had served with in the past. And their horses …! Well, you could buy any two of them for what you’d get from selling an ordinary cavalry horse – and half a dozen for what one of my own family would bring.

  I left Athene in London and took Petrarch with me and also Luke, now matured into a fine beast, rather short in the neck, but deep-chested, strong, nimble and above all eager-to-please. I always felt of Luke that he had observed enviously the gentle imperturbability of Orfeo and the controlled power of Petrarch and somehow determined to try even harder in order to win my love which I gave him most unstintingly.

  Also with me was Christopher, riding the black stallion I had won at Edgehill and which I had named Digby after Lord George whose lively vigour was so well known. Christopher’s manner to me had changed in some subtle way since I had fucked him, but whether he felt debased or elevated by the experience (I mean socially) I did not know. Either was dangerous, for him I mean. I wanted neither a resentful nor a presumptuous servant and if I detected signs which confirmed either diagnosis, then I would rid myself of him quickly enough. But perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps, like Luke, Christopher was simply eager to please.