by S. J. Deas
‘Who are you?’ I demanded.
‘We were in the New Model,’ the man behind me said. His hand was still on his sabre but at least he’d lowered it.
I started. ‘Parliament men? But I thought—’
‘Shut your mouth,’ snapped the first. ‘Hardly half the New Model is Parliament. The rest are men they rounded up as surely as a farmer rounds up lost sheep. We were the King’s horses but we came to it outside Islip. We didn’t know they were pushing that close to Oxford. It was Cromwell himself. He carved us in two and took what was left standing for himself.’ He paused. His face was etched in horror at the memory and I thought this was not the first time he had relived it. ‘You don’t understand. He had hardly a gun in his whole force but he took us apart.’
‘They forced you . . . ?’
‘He said it was servitude or service. But we knew what servitude meant. It meant a rope around your neck. So we signed on. They gave us pay. They fed us. Then they put pikes in our hands. We were the King’s horses and now they wanted us to form a front line against our very kin . . .’
‘Your colours . . .’
‘They have plenty enough coats of Venice red for their own. But they’ve taken so many men who once fought for the King that we take whatever we can find.’
‘Did you fight?’ It occurred to me that their story was not unlike my own. King’s men that Cromwell had turned – or thought he had. These soldiers he bribed with money and food. For me it was the promise of growing old with my Caro.
‘We marched. When we could, we ran. We’re on our way back to Oxford now. We heard tell the King is wintering there.’ He stopped. ‘Tell me – what news of Prince Rupert?’
‘I told you. They had me in Newgate. They took me outside Abingdon. I heard from a Parliament man that Prince Rupert surrendered Bristol two months back. I cannot speak for the truth of his claim.’ I doubted Warbeck had lied. It seemed, from what I’d seen, that he had little reason to. Since they’d let me out of my cell I’d heard of nothing but defeat after defeat for the King’s armies.
In the blackness an owl hooted. I fancied I could hear its wings beating feverishly. Something darted above. Perhaps it was bats. ‘Is it over?’ I begged. ‘The Parliament man told me it was over.’ I didn’t dare tell them I’d seen Cromwell himself, spoken with him face to face. I already knew they feared me a traitor. I suppose, if such a thing might be measured, they’d be right in the assertion. I’d stopped taking sides a long time ago. Doubtless they saw their own situation differently.
‘Not over,’ the first man whispered. ‘Not until the King is restored. But this New Model . . . Falkland, they are fifteen thousand men and more. Paid and fed and whored. Drilled. Not even Prince Rupert will carve them a . . .’
A sound like concentrated thunder split the air between us. I saw a flash of light from one of the inn’s windows. It lasted only a moment but stayed afterwards in my eye. It was Warbeck I’d seen up there and the flash had been the pan of a musket. ‘Quickly!’ I screamed.
It would take him an age to prime the musket again but I already knew that he carried three or four and I didn’t dare risk the chance that he’d primed a one-man regiment for the night. We hurried through the stall door. Warbeck’s horse, spooked by the shot, whinnied and refused to take the halter. I whispered to him but he didn’t hear. In the neighbouring stall one of the deserters had already mounted my own horse. He pushed it quickly out and reined it in just outside the stall door.
‘Hurry!’ he yelled.
I looked over my shoulder. The second man had already abandoned the stall and was scrambling onto the horse behind his companion. They waited for a second before the first man kicked his heels into the horse’s rump and forced it forward.
The boom of a musket fired again into the night and I knew I was right about Warbeck and his arsenal. I heard a scream and saw the second man fall from the back of my horse as they vanished into the night. The other didn’t so much as pause. A moment and he was gone.
I was alone but all was not lost yet. I turned again to try and calm Warbeck’s horse. Its eyes rolled at me in the silvery light. I took a slow step forward and then another. The horse had stopped panicking but it still made low, throaty sounds. At last it allowed me to lay a hand on its mane. I ran my fingers softly in its hair. I teased its ears between my forefinger and thumb. ‘Come on, girl,’ I said. ‘You’ve been through worse than this. You’ve charged a row of pikes, I shouldn’t wonder. You’ve . . .’
The horse froze and I knew something was wrong. Its eye, once fixed only on me, shifted and I dared to think I could see a glimmer of a reflection. Somebody was staring at me out of that eye. A man.
I turned very slowly around. In the open stall door Warbeck stared at me down the barrel of his musket, a weapon with a range of a hundred yards. Then again they misfired as often as not. He’d already had his share of luck plucking one of the deserters from the back of my horse. I fancied I should risk it. Three days ago I’d been going to die anyway. But there was no point without his horse. Silently a part of me begged him to fire, to get it over with and see which way the die would fall. Another part prayed that he would not. It felt a cowardly part there in that moment.
‘Who were they?’ Warbeck asked. He was only slightly breathless, his perfect composure hardly touched.
‘I don’t know.’
‘How did you get word to them?’
There had always been a lot of paranoia about ciphers and codes but surely he wasn’t superstitious enough to believe that I’d somehow delivered a message through a locked pantry door. ‘They were New Model,’ I said.
‘New Model soldiers don’t desert. They’re paid. They’re fed.’
Cromwell had spoken otherwise. ‘They do if they’re King’s men. Warbeck,’ I said, and here I faltered. Suddenly I was tired. I was hungry. I was cold. ‘How did Cromwell do it? Turn royalists to the Parliament?’
Warbeck must have sensed I wasn’t going to run and slowly lowered the musket. There was nothing between us now but the ice cold air making mist of our breath.
‘Every man has his price, Falkland,’ he whispered. ‘For most Englishmen it’s not much more than a sausage.’ He reached to a loop on his belt and threw me a manacle for my ankles. Out in the gloom of night, a ghastly moaning stopped us both short. Warbeck lifted his musket again, pointing it now into the night, perhaps thinking it was some animal, but he must have come to the same answer as I did for the musket turned sharply back on me just as the thought came again that I should run. The sound was from the man he’d shot, not yet dead. That was the horror of these wars. Musket balls rarely offered a gracious end. They tore holes in flesh and bone but more often than not men lingered before they died. I’d seen plenty enough. Some screamed for hours. Others lay glassy-eyed and clammy, panting their way to the last. I’d been lucky after Newbury. Most men weren’t.
‘The manacles, Falkland,’ said Warbeck. As I put them on I told myself I was doing this for Caro. For our future. That there would be other chances and better ones and that I owed it to my children to wait and take them as they came. And as I told myself these things I knew that Newgate had made me into a coward.
The wounded deserter lay on his back. He lay where he’d fallen and barely moved. Once I was chained, Warbeck lowered the musket and turned. I caught a flash of moonlight on steel as he drew out a dagger.
‘Warbeck!’
He stopped. The moonlight caught his eye and I knew I’d been wrong about him. His voice might sound syrupy, but Warbeck was no jester. He was a cold killer. ‘Falkland?’
‘At least give him some words.’
‘Words to a King’s man and a deserter?’ He shook his head and spat, turned away and then paused again as if struck by some second thought. ‘God will judge each and every one of us, Falkland, when our time comes. If it troubles you to see a papist pass without his last rites then give them.’
He moved aside and I shuffled out of the stable.
I moved so slowly that I feared the man would be dead before I reached him, but as I knelt he was still breathing, moaning his harsh, ragged breaths. Warbeck’s ball had hit him in the back and he was lying on the wound. I couldn’t see exactly where it had taken him but the steady trickle of bloody foam that issued from the corner of his mouth told me enough. There was never a coming back from a wound like this. I started to search his pockets for a cross or a rosary but all I found was a small pocket Bible. The man lifted his hand and caught a hold of me. I suppose he thought I was looting him.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked him. He croaked something and more frothy blood ran out of his mouth. At the third attempt I thought I understood him. ‘Rowland?’
He blinked. Perhaps he nodded a little. Something in his face said yes.
‘Do you have a cross, Rowland? A rosary? Something you need?’ I’d hoped he might show me but he shook his head and pulled me closer.
‘No . . . popery,’ he said and reached for the Bible. As I handed it to him he opened it and the moon caught the words across the front. The Soldier’s Pocket Bible. His quivering fingers turned to the last page and then back and he returned it and pulled me close again. ‘I was with . . . Northampton’s . . . Regiment of . . . horse at . . . Naseby,’ he said, forcing out each part of every word with an effort. ‘Read to me.’ He stabbed at the book with a bloody finger. I looked at the page to which he pointed.
‘“The Lord is a man of war”,’ I read. ‘“Jehovah is his name. Thy right hand, O Lord, is become glorious in its power: thy right hand, O Lord, hath dashed in pieces the enemy. And in the greatness of thine excellency thou has overthrown them that rose up against . . .”’ I stopped. The soldier had fallen quiet. He wasn’t yet gone but somehow his breathing was eased. But I couldn’t go on. I had a terrible sense of myself lying in his place, my Caro standing distant over me, black in mourning, her brilliant grey eyes hidden behind a veil of lace. And beside her my son and daughter, John and Charlotte, John all dressed up in a Venice red coat with a pike in his hand, Charlotte weeping into her arm, her long black curls quivering in a harsh, cold wind. I shivered; and then I felt Warbeck behind me.
‘Enough, Falkland,’ he said. ‘Leave him with me.’ His voice was oddly gentle as he drew me away and took the Bible from between my fingers. He returned to the dying man and crouched beside him, pulling back the man’s collar. Now Warbeck, too, read: ‘“Seeing that thou, our God, has punished us less than our iniquities deserve, and hast given us such deliverance as this, should we again break thy commandments.”’ He paused and put the Bible aside. The knife flashed once in the darkness, opening the dying soldier’s throat. He read on. ‘“I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living. I have sworn and I will perform it, that I will keep thy righteous judgements.”’
He leaned forward and ran a hand over the dead man’s face, closing his eyes. It was a mercy, that killing.
CHAPTER 5
I came to Devon on the back of a pack mule we found wandering in a farmer’s razed field. For the first hours of the day I rode with my wrists bound behind Warbeck, but he kept sneaking looks over his shoulder as if he thought I might try to throttle him. I’ll admit the thought crossed my mind more than once. The pack mule had been doing well for himself, finding clean shoots among the black stalks, but he wasn’t difficult to capture. I supposed he’d been part of a baggage train attacked and scattered. If so, he was fortunate to get away. I’d eaten my own share of horsemeat in the winters I’d spent in camps, and even a scrawny pack mule like this would have been a delight to a company of ravaged soldiers.
The snows had started to fall in earnest. We seemed to be travelling with the clouds following behind – Warbeck fancied London was entrenched in white now, that the Thames might never thaw again – and as we came into Devon they caught up. By midday the sky was thick with it and for much of the afternoon we were obliged to seek shelter and wait out the worst. I could see how this infuriated Warbeck. By evening the land was so white that it seemed almost day. The hills took on the ghostly glow of winter and we rode on until we came to a small hamlet. Here Warbeck found us quarters with an old spinster who, ignoring the prying eyes of her neighbours, found us more food than we’d seen in the whole of our journey so far and beds more comfortable than I’d had since Oxford. In return we listened to the story of her life – for Warbeck a torture but for me a sweet salve. I was glad to know people still wanted to go on living, even if these truly were the end times.
The hamlet sat on the banks of the River Exe, somewhere downstream of Tiverton, a town whose name I knew. In the morning we followed the water down. There were fish in the river and we boiled soup. It’s remarkable how good food can restore one’s vitals, a lesson every soldier learns but one that still feels like a revelation every time. By the evening Warbeck had changed our course, following a second river, this time against its flow and to my mind very much back the way we’d come. I began to wonder if he was lost, if the snow had confused his bearings. It was a greedy thought and from it grew others – that there might yet be another chance to escape. I was, perhaps for the first time since my imprisonment, daring to think that I was strong again. I wondered how long the feeling would last.
The river wound through two steep hills. I might have been in Yorkshire; and now and then, when a rise or a valley struck me as oddly familiar, the terror of those old battles forced itself upon me as surely as a bloodthirsty soldier upon a captured whore. The hills were thick with hawthorn and gorse. The snow had settled deeply on top of the branches, making winter crowns. There might have been men hiding in any one of a thousand different holes. I said nothing but Warbeck was sensing it too. He kept throwing looks into the forest.
‘We should have made camp by now,’ I said.
Warbeck nodded. ‘We’re almost there.’
Where the river twisted it was starting to freeze. By morning, I thought, it would be a ribbon of ice winding to the sea. We rounded another bend and I saw lights for the first time. We were closer to Crediton than I’d thought and it was, in my opinion, a foolish place to winter an army where roving bands could get so near without being seen. As we drew towards it, I saw that fires had been built along a low ridge. Below them, a hundred other lights pierced the darkness. It might have been a fancy but I thought I could hear the sound of men cheering. Warbeck drew his horse to a stand and jumped down, sinking to his shins in the snow. As my own pack mule teetered to a stop, Warbeck approached with surprising caution, considering how tightly I was bound. I managed a smirk.
‘You have to ride in a free man, Falkland. If there’s a rumour among the common soldiery of what you truly are then you might not come out of here very well. I shan’t weep, but Cromwell has a purpose for you and would not be best pleased.’
‘I thought half the New Model were royalists you’ve turned,’ I said.
Warbeck didn’t answer. He took hold of my hands and teased at the knot. His fingers were numb in the cold and it seemed to take forever to untie me. ‘Are you ready?’
I looked over his head at the fires. Now that my eyes were accustomed to the land, I saw the spire of a church and the outline of rooftops standing underneath it. ‘I’m ready.’
‘Then get off the mule.’
I threw him a curious look.
‘You can’t ride in there looking like that,’ he scoffed. Then, with a certain hint of disdain in his voice, ‘Take the horse, Falkland. I’ll be right behind.’
The camp began long before we reached the outskirts of Crediton itself. There were tents as I had seen in countless other winter billets – but there were wooden huts as well, things hastily erected and then extended out with annexes of timber and cloth. Snow grew in tall banks around the constructions and it looked as if some were miniature palaces of ice. And the size of it! This was more than a camp. This, I knew long before we reached the border fires, was much more than an army.
A single man was keeping watch over the fires but apart fr
om him I saw nobody. We came through the border like ghostly horsemen. No one noticed us or cried out. No one saw us, yet still I had the terrible feeling we were being watched. It had been with me since we came out of the valley and now it got worse. Sounds came from among the huts and tents, snores here and there, a rattle of laughter, the muffled talk of soldiers that’s much the same everywhere and with every army. Except here there was a difference. Now and then, though the snow muted everything, I thought I picked out a strident voice reading what could have been a passage from the Bible. There was something missing. Singing. No one was singing.
Abruptly, close enough to startle Warbeck’s horse, a door slammed from one of the huts and a man came stumbling out, hurriedly pulling down his breeches and muttering at the cold. He was so intent on the urgency of relieving himself that he didn’t see us right away, though we were no more than a dozen paces short. When he did, I’ve never seen a man’s face change so utterly. He stared at us, bewildered at first to see two men riding in in the dark; and then a moment later his jaw dropped and his eyes bulged and his demeanour changed to an expression of an abject fear more profound than any I ever saw, even in the condemned of Newgate. He turned and opened the door and flung himself inside, tugging at his breeches as he did. As we passed I heard him speak in an anguished cry: He’s here. We passed the hut and I looked back and saw the door ajar once more and pairs of eyes peering through the opening, though they withdrew quickly enough when I met them. The door slammed shut again but they knew I’d seen them.
‘What was that about?’ I asked Warbeck but he seemed as bemused as I. One thing had been clear to me, though. When that man’s face had turned to fear, he’d been looking directly at me. He’d barely noticed Warbeck at all. I wondered if we’d once faced each other in battle. Had I ever been face to face with my enemies and warranted such terror? I found I could not see how. If I’d ever made such an impression on a man, would I not remember? And even if I had, what unlikely twist of fate would cause our paths to cross again in such a way?