William Falkland 01 - The Royalist

by S. J. Deas

  ‘Sir,’ he whispered. ‘I should . . . not. I should not e-even be here.’ Here his stutter returned in force and it took some moments for him to calm. One of the men around Purkiss threw a sharp look my way and a moment later the three of them hurried off.

  ‘All the same,’ I said, ‘I need a guide, so lead on.’ I paused. ‘Or would you like the New Model to know you were sniffing around their stores?’ I hurried to Purkiss and tried to see who these three men were and where they’d gone, but they were already out of sight. They must have been swift on their legs, then. I took Purkiss by the shoulder. ‘Those men. They were from the market square, were they not?’

  He shrugged, but this time I thought I saw through him. ‘Perhaps,’ he admitted when I wouldn’t let him go.

  ‘What did they want?’

  He shrugged again. ‘They wanted to know who you was. I told them you was Cromwell’s man come about them boys who hanged theirselves.’

  ‘And?’

  He looked at me blankly.

  ‘You were talking too long for just that,’ I said. And if these men hadn’t known who I was then why had they stared so when they saw me in the market square? But Purkiss only gawped back in slack-jawed silence until my patience gave up.

  Fairfax had sent me an idiot. I had no use for him and told him so, but Purkiss followed along anyway as the priest led me through the town. We passed back through the market square where a crowd was beginning to form, jostling us even as we made our way around the edges. I looked hard at all the faces in case I saw the men who’d questioned Purkiss, but all I noted was how a space had been cleared and marked near the centre of the square. I couldn’t tell whether the space was meant for a duel of some sort, or for some pre-arranged sport, but I saw no officers.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked the priest. I could see he was anxious to be gone.

  ‘They will . . . have their sport, these boys.’ He tugged at my arm. Purkiss, when I asked him the same thing, gave his usual shrug.

  The old priest led us to a field on the western edge of Crediton set aside for the men whom God – or luck or fate – had deemed fit to spare the coming winter. It wasn’t yet December and I could already see several mounds, places where the snow lay heaped even higher. There were no soldiers camped this far out but we could hear their cheers getting louder in the square. From the sound of it some sort of a contest was going on, not a duel. Jousting without horses, perhaps, and from the wildness of the cheers the competition was growing severe. It would, I suspected, take blood to be spilled before some commander waded in and stopped it. A soldier must not get bored or his mind will wander to darker things.

  The graves, such as they were, were simple and unadorned. Some way across the field a pair of men as old as I were standing before a mound of snow. The ground was open at their feet. I wondered if they were looking grimly into their future – it would have been the sort of joke a certain kind of soldier might have made. Apart from them the only other person stalking this white pasture was a slight figure. It was the first time I’d seen a woman in the camp apart from Miss Cain, and this one was of a similar age – young. She loitered on the edge of the field and didn’t seem to be coming or going. Her hair had once been blond but it had been cropped so fiercely that she was almost bald. I thought perhaps she’d had lice – I have seen men strip their skin raw rather than stay in that condition. I walked towards her but as soon as she saw me she spooked like a deer being hunted. Her hand flew to her face and she let out a squeal of fright then took off. I was in no condition to go chasing her, but I thought I might recognise her face if I saw it again.

  The priest watched her go and then met my eyes. ‘A camp whore,’ he said.

  ‘Come to forage in the graves?’

  ‘God made women to take from men.’

  We waited until the two old soldiers limped away and then the priest took me to the mound where the suicides lay. I’d been standing there for some minutes, picturing those strangled boys holding each other six feet below, when I saw a stick poking through the snow like the shoot of a plant already grown brittle and dead. I approached with caution, not sure where the field ended and the graves started. When I pulled on the shoot it resisted. I tugged again and lifted it free. Once the snow had shaken loose I could see what it was: a simple cross made of two twigs, tied at the centre with a knot of horse’s hair.

  I turned with it in my hand. When I held it up to the priest he cringed away from it as though he was Satan-spawned and not a brother of Christ. ‘Yours?’ I asked him.

  He shook his head fervently, bobbing it back and forth like a demented buzzard. ‘I . . . Sir, I . . . wouldn’t.’

  ‘But who could blame you?’ I went on. The priest was an old man and frightened, terrified even, but I felt a crystallising dislike for him. There’s only one type of man I despise indiscriminately – not a godly man, not an ungodly man, not a soldier, not a thief, not a roundhead or a cavalier, nor Catholic nor Puritan – each may have his own in that regard; but I have never been able to like a coward, especially not in a man of God. ‘You’ve seen it yourself,’ I snapped. ‘There are as many Catholics in this army as there are . . .’

  ‘Of the true Church!’ he squealed.

  I rounded on him. ‘But it must be an affront, mustn’t it, to watch boys who’d gladly take your Mass be buried with that other sort of boy? Good Christian men deserve a good Christian burial, don’t they? It’s not as if you can sneak out at night and start digging up bodies – but perhaps a little cross might help them into God’s Heaven?’

  I was taunting him but he was too taken by his own fears to see it. ‘You . . . have me wrong, kind sir. I . . . icons like this only . . . draw the eye. They cannot draw the spirit. You must . . . believe, sir, if you work for Black Tom.’ He was shaking his head so violently I thought he might be having a fit. ‘But sir . . . they would not . . . put others in with those boys.’

  I put the cross back in the snow. This time I made sure its tip did not protrude. Somebody had planted it here but I was certain it wasn’t the priest. Whoever it was had cared enough for those hanged boys to try, in whatever small way, to appease God; for God – no matter to whom you spoke – did not look kindly on suicides. ‘Did you know them?’

  The priest took it as a welcome question. His body straightened and his face didn’t look so tightly false. ‘Not . . . closely, sir. The New Model had only been in . . . Crediton two weeks when they . . .’ He floundered for words and this time I felt certain he was genuine. He choked. ‘I had . . . met them, sir . . . They came to me for . . .’

  ‘It is as well that you say it. I won’t let them beat you for it.’

  ‘We . . . we don’t have a confessional.’

  ‘But it was confession they wanted?’

  He nodded meekly. I could see he thought he had already said too much, but we were in the middle of nowhere with only the snow and skeletons to hear. ‘I might come to you for the same,’ I told him. I certainly would not but I thought it might ease his fears. ‘Have many soldiers come for confession?’

  ‘It is difficult. When the New Model . . . came they sacked my church. But it has been a . . . godly church since King Henry –’ he crossed himself at the mere mention of the long-dead King – ‘saw the light. They sacked it because of the . . . windows.’

  ‘The stained glass.’

  ‘They call it . . . idol . . . idolatry. They think we worship the glass.’ He whispered the next words. ‘But we only worship God. We worship the same God. We are not heathens.’

  ‘Soldiers came and smashed it apart?’

  ‘They were just boys. They had the wine from the cellar that we keep for . . . the sacrament.’

  ‘Drunk on Christ’s blood and they staved in his windows?’ Yes, this sounded like Cromwell’s army.

  ‘I wasn’t to . . . g-go back. But some of the . . . soldiers s-sought me out . . . Even the ones who . . .’

  He began to cry, big sniffling tears like a child, a
nd I couldn’t hate him now, no matter how much of a coward he was. He was a wretch, but some people are born to be wretches. It’s no more their fault than when a man is born with six fingers or webbed toes. ‘You gave them confessions,’ I said, ‘in a secret place. Where?’

  ‘By the tree . . .’ he stuttered.

  ‘Which tree?’

  ‘The tree,’ he said between gasps for breath, ‘where they hanged.’

  I could get no more out of him for minutes on end after that. He seemed to reach out for me like my son used to do. If he were my son then I would have taken him in my arms, no matter how old he was. I would have smothered him in an embrace and never let go. Instead I just let him cry. When he had swallowed all his sobbing I looked him in the eye. ‘What were they called?’ I asked.

  ‘I . . . can’t tell you what they said!’ he shrieked. ‘The confessional is sacrosanct!’

  ‘Their names,’ I insisted. ‘The dead boys – I’m not interested in their sins.’

  He sniffed. ‘The first was Richard . . . Richard Wildman,’ he whispered. ‘And Samuel. Samuel Whitelock.’

  I let the names sink in. I thought I could picture them, two unknowing Catholic boys swept up in the colossus that was the New Model Army, plundered from their homes like any old pair of boots or piece of jewellery. They must have been relieved to find this weakly priest when they came to Crediton. It must have been a chance to unburden themselves of everything they’d seen and done. I wondered if I’d seen these boys, if our eyes had locked outside Oxford or Abingdon. Six months ago I would have put a sabre through either of them and not given it a second thought. I could have killed them and been content; yet that they had killed themselves left me chilled and eager to know more. In that moment I didn’t understand myself at all.

  ‘And the third boy?’ I asked.

  ‘The boy with the . . . the granadoe? His name was Thomas Fletcher. He was one of our own. A shy boy.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘not him. The other. The third boy who hanged himself. The third boy in this grave.’

  The priest suddenly straightened and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

  ‘Sir, he is-isn’t in that grave.’

  I look at the mounds. ‘Then which?’ Tiny flakes of snow started to fall and I felt a dull hunger aching in my gut.

  ‘He isn’t . . . in a grave a-at all, sir. He’s in the . . . surgeon’s quarters.’

  ‘Not buried yet?’

  The priest shook his head and put his hands together in what seemed a mockery of rapturous praise. ‘Not buried, sir,’ he whispered, ‘and not dead.’

  CHAPTER 9

  The New Model had taken over the town’s biggest house – a place close to the church where a local lord might have lived before raising a militia and going off to war – for its wounded. In an army of this size I supposed there would be an unending parade of the injured and sick. The surgeons would be desperate this winter. Plague would destroy this New Model with more ease than a hundred thousand men fighting for the King.

  By the time we got back to the square, the cheering had ended and the soldiers were dispersing back to their tents and their bunks. I pushed against the flow of them, left the priest to scuttle back to whatever hole he was living in and came to the surgeon’s quarters on foot, Purkiss still trailing in my wake. I wondered if Cromwell had known that one of the boys still lived all along – and if he had, why he hadn’t cared to tell me. There was a chance the message hadn’t reached him. If Warbeck was right, he hadn’t been long back from storming Basing House and finally bringing down the Marquis of Winchester, that constant thorn in Parliament’s side. Cromwell was quickly climbing to the highest level of Parliament at the same time as controlling the biggest army the kingdom had ever known. He’d had to bend rules to get that far, somehow sneaking through the particulars of the Self-Denying Ordinance, and a peculiarity of the man was that he seemed to be everywhere, all at once, rushing hither and yon to watch over everything. Perhaps it wasn’t too fanciful to imagine a detail like this escaping him.

  The boy’s name was Jacob Hotham. He hadn’t been to confessional like the first two, was some years older and, so the priest had heard, devoutly Puritan. Nonetheless he’d abandoned his watch and gone to the same tree in the dead of night, slipped the noose around his neck and taken the lonesome plunge from the branch. I’d begun to devise an idea when the priest had told me about their confessions, that these suicides had not been suicides at all. Two Catholic boys hanging from the tree where they secretly took confession? An army full of Puritans around them? And secrets don’t keep well in armies where men are packed so close about. I could see it done by the sort of boys who’d smashed the priest’s stained glass and torn down the market cross, a gruesome warning to any others of the old faith; but if Hotham was a Puritan then he didn’t fit my notion. That he still lived seemed a miracle, but a miracle I was willing to believe. Some men are reprieved. I once saw musket fire take a man’s face clean off. He lived to fight on. Indeed he fought more fiercely, more proudly than ever, striking fear into the hearts of all those who stood against him.

  I stopped at a distance to watch the surgeon’s house. It was wide and double-fronted, not as big as a lord’s country estate but a good imitation. Probably it had been the home of some minor gentry, perhaps even the same sort of man that my darling Caro’s father had been. Perhaps, like Caro’s father, he’d ridden out in service of his King, taking a loyal band with him and never coming back. Caro’s father was dead four years now. Many of the men who’d marched with him from London we’d put in the ground in the first two years fighting against the Scots. The rest of us were scattered. Some had gone back to their families. I wished I had too; and I caught myself wondering for the thousandth time what had become of that little place I used to call home. Its name was Launcells, two days’ journey on a horse from Taunton – Taunton whose walls I knew had been besieged and then besieged again. I knew, too, from the letters that had finally reached me in Oxford that Caro had considered going there once the farms in this part of the kingdom started to be ravaged. Caro was made of stern stuff and I fancied she could have outlasted any siege, but the town had been with the King and then with Parliament so many different times that sheltering there would have been folly.

  Men came in and out of the surgeon’s house with alarming regularity. I supposed there must have been war wounds still festering, and there must have been disease as well, because here I saw camp whores for the first time. They didn’t go into the surgeon’s house – the New Model was an army and its whores were, as with all armies, casualties that no general would lament – but some lingered in nooks and crannies thereabouts. I watched one man, as old as I and with a tender face, come out and call for one of them. He was carrying a wineskin and he passed it to her. I fancied it was filled with some doctor’s brew to stop the dreaded itch.

  Home. I couldn’t stop thinking of it. I knew I must go further west and I fancied a little north, but it couldn’t be far. If I stole my horse and some food, if I was lucky, if the horse lived the first few days out there in the snow, if I was not waylaid, if I followed the right road . . . But it would be madness in this cold. For all I knew, Warbeck and Fairfax would send a hundred dragoons to bring me back and return me to Newgate and Cromwell for the noose they both thought I so richly deserved.

  The steps up to the door of the surgeon’s house were covered in a thick sheen of ice. I navigated them with care and went in to find a wide hall with stairs on either side leading to a balcony above. I watched two men walk past up there on the other side of the balustrade. There was a low murmur of noise from upstairs.

  Nobody looked at me askance as I went up. In the first room there were empty beds and no surgeon to be found. I took this for a good sign until I saw the way the walls were marbled with dark black stains where blood had been wiped away and the job poorly done. In the next were three pallets with three men stretched out. These, I saw, had been amputations. I’d bee
n present at an amputation once, a man whose leg was blown off beneath the knee. Gangrene had set in and would have taken his life if the surgeons had not intervened. I held him as he thrashed, drunk beyond pain but terribly aware of what we were about to do. The most horrible thing was when he just stopped screaming.

  While I stood there, lost in my own bleak memory, I sensed a presence behind me. I turned to see a young man who must have been no older than twenty-five. Still, I supposed that made him a veteran of these wars and certainly a veteran of the New Model Army. He had mousy hair shorn close to the scalp and soft features almost like a girl, all apart from the nose which seemed an aberrant protrusion from his face.

  ‘Are you a friend?’ he asked me. He meant of the men lying in their cots.

  ‘I was looking for someone,’ I said. ‘Name of Hotham. Jacob Hotham.’

  ‘The pikeman,’ the boy said. He kneaded his hands and I saw they were stained a rose colour, darker where there were creases in his knuckles. I could scarcely believe a boy this young was one of the army’s surgeons but this war had already thrown up so many strange things.

  ‘Where might I find him?’

  ‘I’ll look after this,’ came a second voice, somewhere along the passage. ‘Lucas, I think the artillery man needs your attention. The wound is open again.’

  The surgeon whose name was Lucas caught my eye unaware. I saw that his resolve was almost gone and wondered how long he’d been treating such hopeless cases. As if in sympathy, my own leg twinged. I pictured myself hobbling around my quarters in Oxford last winter. Lucas turned to leave and I saw the man who had been standing behind him, as young as the surgeon but with a less harrowed look. He must have avoided the lice going around because his hair wasn’t shorn. It was thick, black and shaggy. His eyes were green and he had high cheekbones, cresting through his narrow face to give him the appearance of a little lord. It struck me as odd that the tunic he wore was clean; and his breeches too seemed hardly worn. I wondered which dead man they had come from. I’d seen him before, I was sure. He was one of the men from the market square who’d accosted Purkiss while I was in the church. ‘You said you could help,’ I began.