William Falkland 01 - The Royalist

by S. J. Deas

  We crossed the small square where the dead man hung and heard the low rumble of voices assembled in a large group at the end of the street. Before we got there, the hum became magnificent. There was certainly something godly about it. We took one of the narrow lanes and I saw, at its end, men crowded into the market square, completely filling it. I do not think I had ever seen so many men in one place before, not even on the eve of a battle. They thronged and choked the square and every tributary leading into it. The army had filled half the town, packed tight with men.

  ‘What is it?’ I whispered, for my breath was taken quite away.

  ‘Sundays are the army Days of Admonishment,’ Miss Cain answered. She too had lowered her voice, though we could scarcely have been overheard beneath the rumble of ten thousand restless tongues. ‘They bring their pocket book Bibles and listen to the Admonishments. The chaplain leads them.’

  I supposed she meant Baxter, the red-headed ogre I’d met at Fairfax’s quarters the night before. ‘Everyone is here? The whole camp?’

  ‘Every Sunday since they came into Crediton. They purge themselves. They say it makes them closer to God.’

  ‘It sounds like the confessional to me. Yet they hunt boys who want to make a confession.’

  Miss Cain’s green eyes flashed and she gave me a look I couldn’t mistake. She was of the same mind. She moved so that I thought she was putting her arm through mine but instead she simply took hold of my elbow and urged me forward to join the throng. We found a place against one of the houses that bordered the square where we wouldn’t be jostled by soldiers behind us, but we could not escape their stink. It was a peculiar scent: the purity of snow and the fetid musk of man. I looked at Miss Cain but she didn’t seem to notice it in the same way as I.

  The ranks were arranged around the steps where the defiled cross once stood. In the centre I saw a string of men standing sentry with their arms linked, holding back the soldiers at the front while the men behind jostled to get closer. This was less an army than a rabble. I could scarcely compare the pikemen and cavalry who operated so mercilessly on the battlefield to the horde of which I was now a part.

  ‘Is Fairfax here?’ I asked.

  ‘I saw him observe an Admonishment once,’ Miss Cain said, pressing her lips close to my ear so I could hear. ‘The same way he comes to observe drills. There’ll be a hundred pikemen ranked up in one of the fields, dropping and turning and thrusting and wheeling, and Black Tom just watches from his horse, as if he’s studying. It was the same when he came to the Day of Admonishment.’

  ‘As though the soldiers were being drilled here as well,’ I surmised.

  ‘It’s as much a drill as any. Their chaplain says the spirit has to be drilled more fiercely than the body.’

  That I could believe but I’d never seen it done like this. In the King’s army we often shared prayers or else we told stories – which, as any veteran soldier will tell you, are themselves a kind of prayer. I realised, as I thought, that Miss Cain had said their chaplain. Not your chaplain. It pleased me that she recognised I was not a part of this bastard New Model.

  A window ledge pressed uncomfortably into my back. I found that I was able to hoist myself onto it and raise myself a foot above the men ahead of me. From this vantage I tried to survey the crowd, looking for the few figures I’d met since I first came to camp, and at last saw the priest I’d cornered in Crediton church. If I’d imagined he would be a part of this service – was service the right word, or was this something more sinister? – I was wrong. He lurked at the head of one of the lanes that fed into the main square, among a group of boys much younger than himself. They must have been sixteen or seventeen years old, not much older than my own son John would be by now. They were wearing the same Venice red dress as the rest of the soldiers who made up the throng.

  The priest crooked his head and whispered something to one of the boys. At that the boy scuttled away out of my sight. I stared at the others, trying to learn their faces. I had no chance to reach them across this crowd but I fancied I might want to speak with them. ‘Do you know him?’ I asked Miss Cain, cocking my head in the priest’s direction.

  She levered her way up beside me to see. It took her only a moment to understand who I meant. ‘Of course I know him,’ she said. ‘What they did to him was a blasphemy.’

  ‘They took him for a Catholic,’ I said, meaning the New Model.

  ‘They should have taken him for a good man. A devoted man. However you worshipped, he cared for everyone who came to him.’

  A sudden hush spread through the crowd as surely as a rumour. By the time it reached us I could already see the rugged red-headed Baxter emerging from a house on the square’s edge. He was some distance away but he did not look diminutive. Indeed, he looked more statuesque than when I’d last seen him, shovelling stewed apples into his mouth. It would not have been this man who enacted justice on the camp guard locked up in Fairfax’s cell, but perhaps he’d taken part in another sort of justice. I imagined the New Model looked on justice in the same way as they looked on drills: there was physical justice and spiritual justice too. Of the four with whom I had dined last night he had certainly been the most civil; and yet I found in myself a profound dislike for the man and his exclusive notions of God.

  ‘What now?’ I whispered.

  ‘Watch.’

  With the help of a handful of soldiers, the chaplain forced himself through the mob and onto the steps where the cross had once stood, rising above the crowd around him. When he began to speak the murmuring fell away and all eyes watched him. He had with him the same Soldier’s Pocket Bible he’d shown me the night before and he began to read a verse. He had a good voice, I was forced to admit, one that carried right across the square. I could see some of the soldiers held their own books too, following his words, tracing them with their fingers. I saw there were great swathes of men in this crowd who took no more interest in this than they did in any other drill. They shuffled from foot to foot, mouthing the Amens whenever Baxter exclaimed it, following the prayers without the flourishes that I saw in other parts of the crowd. I’d known men like this in the King’s army, plenty of them who did just enough that they would not get punished and yet took care not to stand out from their companions. I wondered how many men were here alongside whom I had once fought.

  And then there were the others. I could easily enough pick out the soldiers who were engrossed by every word the chaplain said. They seemed to me to be the better fed, the men with more life to them, but perhaps that was just an illusion; for these soldiers were more animated, more eager to bellow out their Amens and even recite the verses alongside the chaplain. It was, I decided, not so very different to the Mass. My eyes wandered instinctively back to the lane where I’d seen the priest but he was gone. I supposed he couldn’t stand to hear it.

  ‘Prince Rupert used to lead us in prayers too,’ I whispered, ‘on the eve of every battle. I think he thought it brought us together.’

  Miss Cain’s eyes glimmered again and I saw she was confused. In that second I hated myself. I’d not meant to pour scorn on such a simple thing as a prayer. Miss Cain must have had prayers of her own and I did not mean to take that from her.

  ‘It served the younger boys well enough,’ I said. I did not add that I’d seen a thousand men utter a prayer before a battle only for it to be their last. In my experience, prayers went unanswered. The last three times I rode out to the horns of war I’d not made a single petition. It was just screaming into the void. I still remembered very starkly the first night I’d not prayed before going out to fight. I’d sat long into the midnight watch with a stupid pup of a lad, the son of some nobleman who was eager to prove himself a swordsman and serve his King. ‘There is but one God,’ I’d told him, ‘and his name is Death.’ All the same the boy put his hands together, certain in the knowledge that he would be looked after throughout the fight if only he could draw God’s eye with his devotion.

  ‘Do you thi
nk that all the men who fought before you, who died screaming for their mothers, overlooked their prayers?’ I asked him. ‘Do you think the men on the other side don’t pray too?’ He took it as a jest, as I knew he would, and told me he would say a prayer for me too. We both of us came through the battle and when he saw me after he was wearing the sort of grin that made me certain he should be sent home to suckle on his mother a year or two longer.

  ‘My prayer was answered, Falkland,’ he said. He rejoiced long into the night but I was long past any rejoicing after any battle, no matter the outcome. I never knew what became of him after that.

  I felt Miss Cain’s hand tug my arm and looked up to see a procession of men being led from the same house on the edge of the square. They came with an escort who once more pushed and shoved through the crowd until they reached Baxter’s makeshift pulpit – I could not see it as anything else. There were seven of them and they lined up on the steps in front of him only yards from where the mass of soldiers began. Each was wearing a white sheet wrapped around him like a funeral shroud and on the front of each was pinned a leaf of paper. I could see they were printed, but with what words I couldn’t tell.

  Miss Cain saw my lips part to ask a question but she hushed me. ‘The Admonishments,’ she explained.

  If I’d not understood, all was quickly made clear. On each of the papers were printed the wrongs the soldier was said to have committed. He was to wear them today, for all to see, while Baxter spoke out the things they had done, and then the baying began. ‘Plunder,’ he recited. ‘Blasphemy. Deceit.’ Each word sounded like a knell and each time the crowd grew more fervent. It seemed to me likely there was not a single man in the crowd who had not committed the same sins, but all the same they added their voices to the choir.

  I looked out over the sea of faces, searching for boys who didn’t join in the jeering – to my stark relief I even found some, too contrite or cowed to shout out – when a face leapt out at me. He had high cheekbones and wild, shaggy hair and stood a half foot taller than the boys who crowded him on either side.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Miss Cain, sensing me tense.

  ‘Carew,’ I said.

  If Kate knew who he was then she didn’t say. Carew wasn’t jeering like the rest. Something in me had suspected he would be jeering more fiercely but it wasn’t so. He stood there with an air of calmness around him, like the minute of pure silence you sometimes see in the heart of a storm. I watched his gaze revolve. Clusters of other boys closer to Miss Cain and myself were not jeering either. They hunched together, heads bowed down meekly as if to even look at the catcalls was to become a part of them. My eyes darted between them and Carew, quickly lest I lose him in the crowd. I knew suddenly what bothered me about seeing him there, standing so aloof. Though he was not a part of the chorus, he was revelling in it. That he did not lend his own voice set him apart but it did not distance him from the madness as it did the terrified boys scattered around. They saw it and cringed. He saw it and studied.

  ‘Come,’ I said. ‘Don’t lose me.’

  I made certain I had tight hold of Kate’s hand as I dropped back to the stone flags of the square and pushed forward towards Carew. For a moment she resisted. I looked back. I was suddenly aware of what she was: the only woman I could see in a vast sea of men.

  ‘Wait!’ she hissed. Somebody beside us had noticed her consternation and fixed his grubby eyes on her. He was a low, brawny figure, the perfect sort to wield a pike. His Venice red coat was mired in filth. My eyes wandered back and found Carew again. Around us the jeering was dying away as Baxter turned back to his pocket Bible. Carew turned my way and I feared our eyes would lock but he simply looked straight through me. I released my grip on Miss Cain. She massaged her wrist and I realised how viciously I’d been holding her, though it was only because I didn’t like the thought of losing her in this sea of soldiers. ‘Miss Cain, Kate . . .’ I said. ‘I beg your forgiveness.’

  ‘Begging forgiveness is too late. That’s what I tell every whimpering bastard in this camp.’

  ‘I didn’t want to lose you.’

  ‘Black Tom didn’t name you my champion, Falkland. He named you my tenant.’

  I didn’t have time to answer. The silence had returned. The Admonished men and their escort pushed their way through the crowd back whence they came, and then the doors opened again and another procession began, women this time, though I had to squint to be certain, for every one of them was bald. Some of their scalps were bloody and pitted with scabs so that I could tell their hair had only just been sheared. Like the men who came before them, they were wrapped in white sheets with pieces of printed parchment pinned to their breasts. This time there was only one word on each leaf, the same for all of the women.

  It read WHORE and was printed big and bold.

  Miss Cain, despite her protestations, was still at my side. ‘Camp followers?’ I asked.

  Her eyes met mine. I wasn’t certain but something seemed to have soothed in her, though she still held her wrist and I could not see if I’d bruised her. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen them before.’

  I looked more closely. Miss Cain might not have recognised the women Baxter was parading but I thought that I did. More accurately, I thought I recognised just one of them. She stood on the far right of the procession, her head kept down so that I could not see her eyes, but I still had little doubt. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I need to get closer.’

  ‘Falkland – what is it?’

  ‘Please,’ I answered. I realised I was begging. ‘Come with me.’

  She nodded. ‘I’ll stay close, Falkland. Just don’t manhandle me again.’

  Aware of the brawny pikeman’s eyes still fixed on Miss Cain, I made sure that she went first. We skirted the edge of the square, bustling through the men less eager to be part of the throng, the ones who lingered on the outskirts with their pocket Bibles in hand, and reached the mouth of one of the broader lanes. It was here that I’d seen the priest but now he was gone. Miss Cain and I stopped. We reached the road towards the church but the angle wasn’t yet right to see the camp whore’s face. I began to weave a way forward, careful not to tread on the toes of any soldier who might have taken it badly. I’m not a small man but I was withered by my time in Newgate and this was not the place to pick a fight.

  Halfway into the crowd the men were packed so tightly that we could not have gone further without drawing a sabre and cutting them down. They were like trees in a forest but it didn’t matter. We were close enough. I didn’t draw Miss Cain beside me for fear she would take it unkindly, but nevertheless we were thrust together by bodies jostling on either side. We were perhaps twenty yards from the steps to the severed cross where the camp whores were being admonished. Now I was certain I was right. The girl at the far end of the procession with the word WHORE printed across her breast, she was the same girl I’d seen loitering when I’d gone to the graves yesterday morning with the priest. She had the same thin lips, the same freckled complexion. Her hair, already viciously cropped yesterday, was now gone entirely but her eyes were familiar.

  In front of the women, Baxter was speaking. This close I could hear him more clearly, his voice cutting through the whispering of the crowd.

  ‘. . . to sustain us in this winter, to see us to the first months of spring and the glory that will be God’s when the King will make terms. But a war fought unjustly is not a war that can ever be won. We would be as much defeated by winning this war if we were to turn our back on Christ our Lord as we would were the King to thrash us in the field. But take heart, my brave lads, for neither of these things will come to pass.’

  There were soldiers around me who were rapt. I tried to crane back and see Carew – I had a picture in my head of the way he would be observing this and approving, as though he was something more than a foot soldier in a fiery mob – but I’d lost him in the sea of faces.

  ‘We are an army of God!’ Baxter proclaimed. ‘But we are
not untouched by the devil’s temptations. We are but men. This we admit, because this we must admit.’ He opened his pocket Bible again and read a line. ‘“We are soldiers in Christ and must strain to hear his wisdom.”’ It was oblique enough that the mob might lend it their own interpretation; but for the more stupid soldiers about, Baxter had one already prepared. ‘We want things, do we not? As simple, poor men, we want. But it is up to us whether we should take.’ He stepped around and made as if to reveal the women although they had been there all along. ‘War, my dear friends, is a dirty business. It attracts the holy but it attracts the fallen as well. And it comes to us, as godly men, to cast out those who would wilfully embrace the darkness. Those who sell false trinkets. Those who see God in a pane of glass. Those who, like Eve, sell the promise of the flesh.’

  There rose a great tide of jeering. For the first time, the girl at the end of the procession let her eyes flicker up, as if she had been daring herself to look into this ocean of men who at night might want her but in the cold light of day would gladly hurl stones. Her gaze did not last long. Just as quickly she dropped her head and shielded herself from their cries.

  ‘These mother’s daughters,’ Baxter went on, ‘will march from the camp today and will not return. Should they seek a way back in then I – by the power invested in me by Thomas Fairfax, rightful and godly commander of this army – pronounce their lives to be forfeit. The camp guard will move through Crediton and root out all other camp followers profiting from sins of the flesh. They too will be expelled. My sons, I say to you again that it will be no victory if come the spring we have fallen from God’s grace. This is God’s army. We do God’s work!’

  Four guardsmen, wearing full armour instead of the Venice red coats of the rank and file, emerged from the crowd, two from one side and two from the other. The women must have been instructed as to how it would happen for not one of them protested. It seemed they were to be allowed to keep the white sheets they were wrapped in, though mere sheets would not be much comfort to anyone forced to spend the night in the wild; it was not even midday and the smell of frost was in the air.