by S. J. Deas
I was too far from the embers. Perhaps that was what had kicked me into wakefulness – my body’s last attempt not to freeze. I made as if to stand and it was only then that I realised my ankles were bound in the same way as my wrists. Like a grub I wriggled my way towards the fire, sending waves of shock coursing through my skull and from there throughout my body.
Damn Cromwell, I thought. Damn Fairfax. Damn Whitelock and Wildman and the boy who’d flung himself on the granadoe. I’d been set on dying. I’d made my peace with it. Now here I was, hog-tied by a society of whores, driven to these paltry embers in case they could keep me away from death just a few hours longer. It’s not fair the way the body wants to live even if the mind says not.
By the time I reached the fire my breathing was as heavy as a man whose chest has been torn apart by musket fire. I lay there for some time and, when the spasms had subsided, sat up. One of the women who had been supposed to be keeping watch was suddenly awake, her vivid eyes fixed on me. I must have woken her by thrashing across the clearing. I could see she was terrified – terrified of me, bound hand and foot, who had only come to talk. She started back and clenched her partner’s shoulders with each hand. She was about to shake her awake when I realised this was the very woman I’d come to question. I fixed her with a look. ‘Mary . . . It is Mary, is it not?’
Hearing her name quieted her. She withdrew her hands from her sleeping partner and wrapped her arms about herself.
‘Please,’ I began. ‘I did not come to—’
‘I know why you came,’ the girl named Mary shivered. ‘I know who you are.’
‘Then you know I mean you no harm. You needn’t have ambushed and bound me.’
‘It wasn’t me,’ Mary began. Her voice was hoarse, her throat constricted by the cold. ‘Helena was the one who struck you. She said you’d come to rob us. We don’t have anything to rob but she said it didn’t matter. You could still take things.’
‘How long has it been?’
There came a low grumbling from the huddled girls. Somebody tried to turn in their sleep but was hemmed in and could not move. ‘I don’t know,’ Mary peered at the black patches of sky I’d seen for myself. At least there was no blizzard tonight. ‘I wish it were dawn,’ she began. ‘I wish I were—’
‘Would you untie me, Mary?’
‘Helena would be mad.’
‘I promise not to lay a hand on any of you.’
‘You shouldn’t have come.’
‘I had to talk to you while I still had a chance. They’ll be missing me in camp by now. I’m not supposed to leave. I swore I’d be back in no more than an hour. If they come looking . . .’ I waited for her to understand. ‘You don’t want them to find me here, do you?’
She did not.
‘It would be best if I could get back so they might call off the search.’ I knew they certainly wouldn’t be searching now, not in the thick of night, but I fancied this Mary was too afraid to consider this. I did not like to think of the promise I’d made to Kate. She’d have reported me gone long ago. I wondered – would they come looking? Would Fairfax bother with me when he was so keen for me to be gone? What if he didn’t?
Mary eased gently away from her partner and laid her down by the fire. Silently she crossed and knelt to tease out my bonds. I felt her icy fingers on mine. Her hands were tiny and trembling. She knelt over me and her breath, misting the moment it escaped her lips, enveloped me.
‘There,’ she said after some minutes, ‘I’m sorry.’ She went to untie my shins as well but I made her go and warm her fingers over the fire and set about doing them myself, pausing now and then to screw up my eyes against the fresh needles of pain that stabbed through my head. When I was done, I foraged for kindling. A dead branch lay in the roots of a tree and, though it was frozen on the outside, inside the wood was dry and flaked easily. I conjured up some more flames and built up the fire. I would like to say I did it for the women to keep them from freezing before dawn, but in truth I was concerned largely for myself. Still, it did no harm. In the rekindled fire, Mary glowed.
‘I saw you,’ she finally said. ‘At the grave mounds. You were with our father from the church.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘though the church is no longer his.’
‘He used to take my confession when I was a girl. That church will always be his to me.’ She was holding her hands too close to the growing flames and snatched them back.
‘You’re a Crediton girl?’ I asked. It seemed preposterous that she should have lived in the town all her life and yet still found herself an exiled whore among the camp followers.
‘Oh yes,’ she answered. ‘So you see, they’ve driven me out at last. They drove out my mother when they came to town because they needed rooms to house their officers. She went to relatives in Exeter but I refused to go. I wouldn’t be thrown out. I had a sweetheart and I wanted to stay. But he was sore injured in one of their contests and—’
‘A contest?’ I asked. ‘I saw them fighting the other night. What manner of contest?’
‘Some fusiliers found he tried to join one of the King’s militias back when the battling began. They said he had to denounce his own King or pay for it, but he was too proud.’
I didn’t ask her more. I saw already how this contest must have ended: death for one and whoredom for the other.
‘I knew you were a good man,’ Mary whispered, ‘when I saw you at the mounds. Our father doesn’t fraternise with bad men. He would have run away long ago but he still thinks that God is looking over us, that we’ll be free of the army soon. It isn’t a godly army, sir. They say it but they don’t know what it means.’
‘Why were you at the grave mounds, Mary?’
‘I was . . .’ She hesitated as if she did not want to say, yet I sensed this was not some secret she was trying to preserve but that she was merely embarrassed; as if to say the thing might make her blush. ‘I was looking over a friend.’ She looked at me imploringly. ‘We have the same friend, do we not?’
She thought me a friend to one of the boys? Perhaps it was better this way. ‘How well did you know him, Mary?’
She couldn’t look me in the eye. When she said, ‘I was his whore’, with a mild shrug, I knew instantly it was more than that.
‘You were his only one,’ I surmised.
‘Lots of men have favourites,’ she answered. ‘I was his.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it was more than that. A favourite whore might be aggrieved if her suitor stops coming but she doesn’t go sniffing around his grave. She doesn’t plant a cross where he lies, especially with all those Puritan boys marching around looking for stained glass windows to smash and market crosses to unearth. No, he was more, wasn’t he?’
Mary looked up. Her eyes were shining wet and I saw that she was struggling to hold back tears. ‘Helena says a whore doesn’t fall in love.’ Her whisper was hoarse.
‘Is that how it was? You fell in love?’
‘Richard,’ she said, breathing the name carefully as if to honour his memory. Then she screwed up her eyes. ‘I lay with his brother once, but only once. It hurt Richard too much.’
‘His brother?’
‘Why, the other boy,’ Mary said, bemused now. ‘The one who hung himself after. Samuel.’
For a moment I was taken aback with enough surprise to forget the pain in my head. ‘I’d been told his name was Whitelock.’
‘They had different fathers but they grew up together. They counted themselves brothers, sir, that’s what matters.’ She paused for a while and then went on. ‘I think I was Richard’s first,’ she said quietly. ‘Certainly his first whore. He barely knew where to put it. His brother was better but not like a lot of the men in camp. Still, sir, I would rather lie with a royalist boy than a Puritan, no matter how skilful he is with his hands.’
‘How long?’ The pain threatened to overwhelm me again. I tried to think, forcing myself against the pressure of it. Wildman and Whitelock, brothers?
&n
bsp; ‘Ever since the army came to camp, sir. I fell in with Helena and some of the others soon after my sweetheart died. They’re the real camp followers. They latched on to the New Model at Naseby.’
She told me more, our voices hushed so we didn’t wake the other girls. I did not want to know how they would react to see me untied and nor did I want Mary to suffer for it. Now and then we paused and braved the cold for more firewood. Wildman had been nervous when he first came to her but she knew the things to say to soothe him and soon he was brave enough. He came every week – the New Model, as I’d discovered, were paid soldiers and could afford to waste their coins on sins of the flesh, no matter how godly they claimed to be. Wildman had grown up with Samuel Whitelock on a farm outside Exeter, the very same country from which Mary’s family had once sprung, and he talked of it ceaselessly: the rolling dells and fields of wheat that he hoped, one day, he and his brother might harvest together with a flock of squabbling children of their own. Exeter had been a parliamentary outpost in the kingdom’s royalist south-west but we’d put it to siege and wrested it away almost three years ago. I’d been there myself, in charge of the men who turned the Parliament’s artillery back against the city and forced them to make terms. After the siege we considered Exeter a safe haven. The King’s daughter was even born there, in the eye of the quickening storm. Since then the city had remained loyal to the King but was now under a different kind of siege, a winter siege where sickness and starvation were more potent weapons than any kind of artillery or guns. The presence of the New Model in Crediton was, itself, a part of that siege. They were quartered close enough that they could take up arms at only a few days’ warning should Fairfax have been foolish enough to risk a winter march.
‘They ran away together two years ago when the war came down. Taunton and Bristol and . . .’ She said it as though it was the end of the world. ‘They meant to fight for one of the King’s militias, and joined up with some men who were on their way to find a relief regiment harrying Parliament when they tried to take Exeter back. But then . . . then came the New Model. It just ate everything up. After Naseby Richard and Samuel were swallowed, just like all the hundreds of other good boys in that camp. They hadn’t even had the chance to fight for their King.’
‘Perhaps some in the camp knew their true allegiance?’
Mary blanched. ‘Sir, it was never a secret. How long have you been with the New Model?’
‘Long enough to see it for the chimera that it is.’
‘They had friends. Enough to make them feel safe even with all those fiery Puritan boys marching around. I won’t say there weren’t times when being for the King was a bad idea, but it was never a death sentence – if it were then half the New Model would be hanging from that witching tree and Black Tom wouldn’t have an army left to fight with, and the King would be back on his throne and . . .’
And I would be with my dear wife and children, catching up on the years that had been stolen from me, trying to be the father I once dreamt of being, had chance not denied me. I blinked back tears of my own. ‘Did you see him the day . . . ?’ I paused, tried to gauge her reaction. ‘The day they found Richard, had you seen him?’
She hesitated and began chewing on her bottom lip. I wondered whether it was to hide a secret or to swallow a truth. ‘I hadn’t seen him for some days,’ she said. ‘There had been a . . .’ She fumbled to find the right word. From somewhere in the trees came a sudden rustling and her eyes darted to find it – some woodland rat drawn to the fire, drawn to people. ‘You see, I loved him. I did love him. But there are things I had to do. Love doesn’t feed you in the morning or keep you warm at night. I thought Richard understood that. He must have known I lay with other men because of Samuel. That was only once and I promised him never again. I’d not known then that they were brothers. Once I knew then I made an oath I wouldn’t go near Samuel again – even if that meant an idle night, even if it meant Helena’s . . .’ Her eyes flitted to the huddle of sleeping women. Somewhere there was her mistress, though I did not know which. ‘But I could not forsake all others, sir. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t do it.’
I thought I knew how it had been. ‘He caught you with a man.’
‘He was upset about something. He came to find me on a night when he wasn’t expected. I was in the tent. I wasn’t yet finished.’ She paused. ‘Do you think me sinful, sir?’
‘It doesn’t matter what I think.’ The sins or otherwise of soldiers and their whores seem to me to be beyond any man, god-fearing or otherwise.
‘Have you lain with whores?’
I had not. Caro was the only woman I’d ever lain with. Even on the road with the King’s armies I didn’t care for whoring and siring bastards like many of the men with whom I marched, Caro’s own father included. ‘Once or twice,’ I lied, seeking to spare the girl her blushes. ‘It upset him, did it?’
‘He ran away. I feared I wouldn’t see him again. For nights he didn’t come and I was convinced he’d forsaken me. I knew he’d not found another. I asked but nobody had seen him, nor his brother. When he did come again it was as if he was fevered, though he had no sickness that I could tell. He had a . . . power about him. He had an energy.’ She paused. ‘It was terror.’
‘Terror of what?’
She was silent, unable to put it in words, and I understood it wasn’t the common sort of terror a boy might have, the terror of living or the terror of holding a musket or a pike, of looking into another man’s eyes and then seeing the light in them dim. ‘He brought with him that book they all carry,’ she said at last. ‘The Soldier’s Pocket Bible. Do you know it?’
‘I’ve seen it.’
‘He kept fingering the pages. He asked me to read to him. Only it wasn’t that he couldn’t read. He was a bright boy, his mother a clever woman who kept the ledgers for his step-father’s farm. He just wanted to hear me saying it. There was a passage he liked.’ Her voice adopted a low whisper as she quoted, ‘“A Soldier is a Good Man who serves a just Cause. A Soldier must be dutiful in his observance of God.” He’d paid it no mind before. I told you already, sir, he went to confession and he had his own book. It didn’t matter what verses the New Model wanted to quote at him. He knew his Bible well.’
It was dawning on me, just as she wanted it to. ‘But that pocket book – it’s not really a Bible. Not for boys like Whitelock and Wildman. Not for royalists. Not for Catholics.’
‘He was a good boy, sir. You mustn’t think ill of him.’
‘It doesn’t matter a thing to me how he wanted to worship.’
‘Are you a godly man?’
‘That word has a hundred different meanings. I don’t care to think about it.’
‘I tried to tell him he was sick, that he didn’t know what he was saying, that he was a good man and God knew good men. But now here he was, fingering that pocket book, his head full of torments. He said he’d finally seen the truth as if his eyes had been opened. He was going to burn in Hell, he said. He’d been worshipping devils all his life and he hadn’t even known. He said there were things he had to do, that there was a way he could make things better. He’d been with some of the other boys in camp and smashed the stained glass windows in the church . . .’
I started. ‘Wildman did that?’ The revelation dashed me from my thoughts and for a second time from the pain throbbing in my skull.
Mary bowed her head and now the tears wouldn’t be held back. She wept. I put an arm around her and she didn’t resist. I couldn’t think what else to do. ‘You can’t buy your way back into God’s favour,’ she sobbed. ‘He gave me his rosary and a little wooden cross he kept in his pocket. He told me to keep them for him. I begged for him to take them back, that he should stay the night . . .’ She paused. ‘But that was the last I ever saw of him.’
Her tears returned and we huddled together. The warmth of another soul on a night like this filled me with sadness and a loathing for this useless war. ‘What happened,’ I began, when her s
obbing subsided, ‘to terrify him like that?’
She had no reply. ‘I’ve turned it over and over in my head, sir. I’ve looked at it every way there is. He was a good boy. He had friends in camp. He had me. He had a brother . . .’
‘A brother who hung himself from the very same tree.’
She nodded.
I drew away. I’d delayed the question I most wanted to ask, in part to hear her story and in part while the fire warmed my frozen bones. I could put it off no longer. ‘Mary, did Richard Wildman hang himself from that tree?’ I asked, standing at last and feeling the cold of night leech at my skin. ‘Or did somebody take him there and put that rope around his neck? And if they did, do you know who?’
For the first time that night Mary’s eyes didn’t wander. She fixed me with a glare like no other and spoke without any quiver in her throat. ‘He did it himself, sir. I know it. Whatever terror had struck him so, he could not run from it. Hanging from that tree was the only way he could escape.’ She filled her breast with the cold night air and breathed out steadily as if barely able to contain herself. I’d not seen this in her until now: not fear or sorrow but a sheer, blind rage. ‘Would you like to know the very last words my Richard spoke to me, sir? Perhaps the very last things he said to anybody in this whole world?’
I gazed at her across the fire. ‘I think I would.’
‘He said there was a man coming who would expose all those who worshipped the devil, and then he said, “I would rather die by my own hand than burn on somebody else’s pyre.”’ She exhaled and the air around her became a cloud. ‘Do you know what he meant by that, sir?’