William Falkland 01 - The Royalist

by S. J. Deas

  He extended his hand and clasped mine. His fingers were long and etched with dark stains in the creases of the knuckles which seemed at odds with his pristine clothes. Blood, I supposed, from working with the surgeon. His arms were thin like the rest of him but his grip was strong and sure. Then he put his other hand on top of mine and smiled, and I felt fortunate he didn’t bend down to kiss me as if I was a maid he was intent on courting. ‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Carew. Edmund Carew. Might I have the pleasure?’

  ‘Falkland,’ I said.

  ‘With which troop?’ He smiled as he asked it.

  ‘I’m not with any troop,’ I said. ‘I’m here on Cromwell’s account to look into the killings.’ I felt quite sure I was telling him something he already knew.

  ‘Killings?’

  ‘The boys who hanged themselves,’ I corrected. ‘It creates a bad atmosphere in an army when you don’t even need an enemy and your boys end up dying. So I’m here to settle his stomach.’

  This Carew had a careful air about him quite unlike the other boys I’d seen thus far in the camp. He was thoughtful and quiet. I imagined he’d been the son of a lord but as I followed him along the balcony he told me he was only a soldier. I knew that the New Model was a different kind of beast but the idea that the sons of lords and the sons of commonfolk could fight alongside each other was preposterous. I followed him to the end of a passage and he opened a door into a room that had once been a lady’s bedchamber. There was still a tall mirror on the wall. There was only one bed here, a broad cot with a real mattress instead of a straw pallet. I’ll admit I stared – I’d forgotten what it was to sleep in a bed like that. Unlike the chamber with the amputees there was no fetid smell in the air. The place had been perfumed. He was being treated well, this boy, better than the others here. It struck me as strange for an attempted suicide.

  Two other boys sat by the bed beside him. At first I thought they looked remarkably similar to Carew but then I realised it was nothing physical, only the way they held themselves with the same easy pride. The first had thin blond hair and a complexion to match, with piercing blue eyes. The second was shorter and rounder and his hair was cropped close to his head. Like Carew they were wearing the cleanest clothes of any soldier I’d seen in camp, perhaps even cleaner than Fairfax himself. They did not wear the usual soldier’s uniform: instead of the red coats they wore black.

  I recognised the smell now. It was soap.

  Carew took me to the bed where, in real woollen sheets, lay Jacob Hotham. At first I thought him asleep but he stirred when I stood above him and I saw the flagon at his bedside. He’d taken some sort of draught. He’d been a handsome lad once but now he wore a necklace of black and blue bruises and his face was swollen besides. I thought he might once have had the same way about him as Carew and the others in the room, the sense of oneself that can only come with a proper ancestry. Now his eyes were grey and bloodshot. They rolled, locked with mine, and he tried to draw himself up. There was a fear in his face as though he’d seen a ghost. The sheets were wrapped tight around him and he struggled to get his hands free, and it was only then that I saw they were bandaged up, both of them, so he looked to have two hoofs instead of hands; and what I’d taken for a tunic was another kind of bandage, designed to keep his back braced. I wondered what damage he’d done to himself when he fell out of the tree.

  A thought hit me. The rope around the branch had not unravelled. I could still see it as clear as day. Somebody had taken a knife to it. Somebody had cut Jacob Hotham down. I thought I would like to meet this someone and ask them what had brought them to be watching that tree so they were there to save him; and to ask what else they might have seen.

  The boys at his bedside took alarm at seeing him put himself to such exertion and quickly stood to help him back down. In seconds he was back in the bedsheets. He made a feeble motion for the flagon at the bedside and Carew went to put it to his lips.

  ‘Please,’ I said, holding it back. ‘I would speak to him first.’

  ‘I’m afraid you can speak all you wish,’ Carew began, shaking my hand away and helping Hotham take a drink. ‘He can hear you but he won’t be able to answer. The ropes hurt him more than we thought. The surgeon doesn’t know if he’ll ever speak again.’

  At this Hotham’s grey eyes found mine again. I could have been wrong but I thought he was screaming out.

  ‘Which one of you was it?’

  Carew turned so suddenly that he spilled some of the herbal draught onto the bed.

  ‘Which one of you cut him down?’ I went on. ‘It was one of you, I presume?’

  Carew nodded. His expression eased and I wondered what he’d first thought I’d meant. ‘We are old friends,’ he said. ‘We grew up together. It was only natural we should fight for the good cause together too. He was fortunate I was there for him.’ Carew made certain his friend was not wet from the spill and brushed back his hair. ‘Still, I have no doubt he would have done the same for me. We are, all of us, praying for his recovery.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’ I said it as much to Hotham as I did to Carew. Again his grey eyes rolled. This time he didn’t try and drag himself up. The draught was working on him and his eyelids looked heavy. I could not quite be sure whether his friends here were caring for him or keeping him quiet.

  ‘We were part of the watch that night,’ said Carew. ‘We walk circuits around certain parts of the camp and the countryside all around. It isn’t the King’s army you have to watch out for. Those womanly cavaliers are wintering in Oxford, getting lazy and fat. They know the war’s as good as over so they might as well enjoy their freedom while they can.’ He sounded scornful, of course, but he also betrayed a vicious glee.

  I didn’t rise to his bait. I too was young and foolish once.

  ‘We’d known about those other boys, of course,’ he said. ‘I won’t say we knew them. We don’t fraternise with that sort.’

  ‘Catholics?’

  ‘Royalists,’ Carew replied. ‘It’s insult enough we have to stand alongside them when the battles come. To spend a winter fraternising is more than a godly man can bear. All the same, what happened . . .’ He shook his head solemnly. ‘Jacob wanted to see the place. We’d been calling it the witching tree. Not our name, you understand, only a name that’s been going around camp. The rest of us had no interest in seeing that sinful place and I suppose he must have been counting on it.’ Carew looked up at me. His eyes were shimmering as if he was on the verge of tears. Godly tears for a good friend. ‘When he didn’t come back, God sent me the truth of what he’d done. Have you had a vision like that before, Master Falkland?’

  ‘I have not.’

  ‘Are you a godly man?’

  ‘I am not godless.’

  He knew I was evading the question; but how do you tell a young man who believes that God helped him rescue his dear friend that, to you, God is as much a story as fairies at the bottom of the garden? It hardened him, though. If there had been a chance we might be friends, it had gone. ‘I started running,’ he told me. ‘I got there in time. God had already intervened. He was dangling but not dead. I climbed to the branch and cut him down.’ Here he looked more sad than ever. ‘I knew the fall might kill him just as easily as the rope. But I had to cut. The surgeon has put a splint on his leg and both his wrists are shattered. Jacob’s war is finished, Master Falkland. He will return home as soon as he is able. That the rope has taken away his voice might even be a blessing. At least now his dear mother will not have to hear the story.’

  Carew had his hands together as if to pray. Against my will I found myself doing the same. ‘I would like to ask him some questions,’ I said. It seemed strange that he had hurt himself so. I had dropped from the same branch but the night before and survived with nothing more than a twinge in my knees and bruises to my pride. The snow had cushioned my fall, true, but to such an extent?

  ‘Have you listened, Master Falkland?’ Carew’s voice was level, eac
h word enunciated perfectly as if he was an actor. He was definitely a boy trained for a lordly life. ‘He cannot speak.’

  ‘There are ways,’ I began.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Things I might ask. I might need only a nod of the head.’

  ‘He needs his rest.’

  ‘Can he write?’

  Carew snorted with derision. ‘Did you see his hands, Master Falkland? Broken so that the surgeon believes they will be little more use than stumps.’

  ‘But he knows how to write?’

  I heard footsteps behind me. I turned to see Lucas, the surgeon, and had the sudden feeling that I was surrounded, trapped in a classic bluff by two small bands of soldiers. ‘Master Carew,’ I said, ‘I’m grateful for what you could tell me. I take it you know nothing of the other two boys who hanged themselves?’

  ‘Only their names, sir, and that they had no place in this army.’

  I walked past the surgeon. At the door I turned around. ‘There was one other thing,’ I said. ‘There was another boy. Thomas Fletcher. You might know him as White Tom.’

  ‘The boy who stole the granadoe. Yes?’

  ‘You knew him?’

  ‘Only his story. You are right, sir – it is intriguing to wonder why White Tom and Jacob both went down to the tree where those boys died. I am afraid, though, that we have stopped thinking about it. There will be many more die before the winter is out. More if the King does not quickly come to terms as he must. These unfortunate incidents are best forgotten. We just want our friend back.’

  CHAPTER 10

  I’d spent much of the morning by now walking from one place to another, asking my questions and finding little by way of answers. I still couldn’t say whether the first two boys had hanged themselves or whether they had received some considerable help. They had been Catholics, and Catholics clearly lived in fear and perhaps some considerable peril. Edmund Carew knew more than he’d chosen to tell me but I doubted even a skilled torturer would coerce the truth from him. I suspected the same was true of the other boys who surrounded Jacob Hotham. Hotham himself would tell me a far more interesting story, I felt sure, but only if God saw fit to return his voice. I began to muse on ways to speak with Hotham alone and then stopped myself. Why? To what end? The answer I should give to Cromwell was simple enough: you’ve pressed Catholic boys into service in your army of Puritans. There’s simply nothing more to say. I doubted he’d be much pleased with such an answer but I felt sure that, at its core, here was the truth of this mystery. What did it matter whether they’d hanged themselves or whether Edmund Carew or some other boy like him had seen to their murder? It would happen again with some other boys in some other way, and again and again, and the cause would remain the same. Was not my task here as good as done? Was it not done before it even started?

  I rose from where I sat, watching the surgeon’s house, and made my way towards Miss Cain’s, resolved to propose to Warbeck that I’d as good as completed my work. I doubted he’d be pleased but I thought perhaps he might see the reason of my argument, and, too, I knew he’d find the notion of an early return to London entirely agreeable. And yet as I walked I felt my resolve wither with each step. I didn’t know whether those two boys had died by their own hands or by others. I suspected they had been murdered, but I found that merely thinking it wasn’t good enough. They deserved better. Their mothers deserved better. They deserved not to live with the shame of a suicide. For the first time since we’d left London, I found myself cursing the conscience that had hounded me to hang that rapist and murderer in York. I’d confounded the King then. Now it seemed I would confound myself.

  It was still possible, I supposed, that Warbeck might see matters otherwise, but when I got back to the house I found him in a foul temper. He didn’t speak to me or ask me where I’d been, only where Purkiss was.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I told him. ‘I ordered him to wait outside while I went to see the third boy who tried to hang himself. I learned last night that he didn’t die and was cut down before he could strangle. Sadly he’s in no condition to speak. When I came out, Purkiss was gone.’ Or perhaps he wasn’t. For all I knew the little man had been watching me ever since. The simple truth was that I’d been too distracted thinking on ways to get Hotham to tell me what had happened, and Alfred Purkiss had slipped my mind. I wondered why Warbeck had any interest in him. ‘I dare say he’ll return tomorrow. Or perhaps not. He seems to be a simpleton.’

  Warbeck snorted. ‘Purkiss? Fooled you so easily, did he, Falkland?’ He shook his head and grunted; and when I asked him whether his morning had been in any way productive, thinking I might lead on to the suggestion that I’d already found as good an answer to Cromwell’s mystery as any, he snarled more like a roused dog than a man. ‘What about Miss Cain? Have you seen Miss Cain?’

  I had not, I realised, not since I’d left that morning. Something in Warbeck’s tone gave me to think that all might not be well and it troubled me how anxious I became at the notion. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I have not.’

  I thought perhaps he relaxed a little, which seemed a trifle odd. He glowered and appeared in no mood for further conversation, though, and so I left him there and went back into the street, leaning beside the doorstep, blowing on my hands. Now and then groups of soldiers walked by, some looking up with a dull curiosity as they passed, others deep in their own thoughts. I tried to set my mind back to thinking about Hotham and how I’d get his story out of him but I found myself constantly distracted. It had not occurred to me until Warbeck had planted the suggestion that Miss Cain might be in any danger; now, though, I saw only too clearly the perils for a young woman alone in this army of men. I wondered what made her stay.

  I resolved to take myself to the edge of the camp and see if I could trace our path back to that first hut Warbeck and I had passed as we entered the camp last night; but before I could take a step I spied Miss Cain herself walking quickly along the street from the square. A wave of relief swept over me. It vexed me, the force of it. She had what I took at first to be a black basket swinging from her hand. As she came closer I saw it was a pair of dead crows. She didn’t smile as she reached the door but I sensed she was pleased with herself.

  ‘There’ll be meat in the morning,’ she said brusquely, and stepped past me into the house; then, with the door barely closed behind her, I heard a thud and a squeal of fear. I moved with a speed I thought I no longer possessed, tearing open the door and reaching for a sabre I didn’t have and hadn’t worn for almost half a year. In the hall, Warbeck had Miss Cain pressed against the wall, one arm almost across her throat. In the other hand he held a dagger almost touching her neck. ‘Papist whore!’ he spat, then saw me in the door. Something in my face must have seemed terrible indeed for he let Miss Cain go and took a pace back, and for a moment his look became uncertain. I suppose he’d thought I was gone and that they were alone. As I advanced, he took another step away, keeping a distance between us. I had no weapon, yet this time he was the one more afraid. In one hand he held his dagger. In the other he had something small and loose like a bracelet. He threw it to the floor at Miss Cain’s feet and I saw it was a rosary. He stared at me and then at Miss Cain, eyes full of accusation. ‘It was in her room,’ he said. ‘I’ll not shelter under the roof of a Catholic whore!’

  I was of a mind to run him down, dagger and all, for words like that and see who would come out the best of it. Despite my months in prison I fancied I was the stronger man, and the odds lie with the knife only if the man who holds it won’t blink from striking. I supposed Warbeck wouldn’t flinch if he had to. I supposed, too, that if I were to get the best of him, I might go as far as to murder him, with all the consequences that would bring. With some difficulty, then, I reined in my temper and bent and picked up the rosary. I held it up and made a show of patting down my pockets and studying it. Then I looked Warbeck in the eye. ‘Where did you find it?’

  His lips peeled back from his teeth in a parody of a laugh
. ‘Yours, is it, Falkland? I don’t think so. I told you – I found it in her room.’

  ‘No,’ I said, continuing my appraisal. It was old, I thought. A few wooden beads and a crude wooden cross on a piece of twine. ‘Not mine.’ I held his eye. ‘Cast your mind back: when Fairfax led us past the church last night I saw two men watching us. They turned and ran when I looked back and called out to them to stop. I told you one of them had dropped something.’ I had said no such thing but hoped the lie might confound him.

  Warbeck shook his head but I could see he wasn’t certain. ‘You did not.’

  ‘Why else do you suppose I stopped?’ I scoffed at him and tossed the rosary back. ‘That’s what I found, lying there in the snow.’

  His laughter was forced. ‘You expect me to believe that, Falkland? This is the New Model Army. There are no Catholics hereabouts! None!’

  I knew I had him now. I saw even Miss Cain, recovering from her shock, look at him with scorn and pity. ‘You have the evidence in front of you, Warbeck, but if that won’t do for you then shall I tell you what I’ve found today? The two boys who hung themselves? Pressed royalists. Catholics. They gave their confessions to a priest. They used to do it by that tree – I suppose that’s why it was chosen. Half your army here once fought for the King and a quarter of them were once Catholic, but if you don’t believe me then go and ask Fairfax, or ask Cromwell himself – they cannot either of them fail to know the truth of it!’

  I think he hated me then more than ever he did on our way from London. He knew, however hard he fought against it, that a man cannot easily lie with such conviction. But I didn’t dare give him time to even breathe – instead I rounded at once on Miss Cain. ‘But how, Miss Cain, did this come to be in your room? I can only imagine it slipped from my coat pocket as I slept. What did you mean by taking it?’ I glared at her. I hoped she understood my pantomime and why it must be done.