by S. J. Deas
‘You mean their fathers were pressed?’
‘Pressed or runaways or . . . Those poor little ones had to come somewhere, so they came here. They tried to put soldiers in this cottage but I wouldn’t hear of it. This place is for the children.’
I had to smother a smile when I imagined it: old Mrs Beatrice Miller, answering the door to a raft of New Model pikemen and telling them there was no room for them to lay their heads. I had little doubt that a woman as proud and fearsome as this could repel the advancing soldiery, however diminutive her size, but somehow I fancied it had been the idea of half a dozen squalling children that had driven them away.
She opened the door and went through first. I followed. The room was gloomy but some candles had been lit to buoy the pale moonlight filtering in through the frosty window. It was small too, some wooden seats arranged around a hearth and a big deerskin rug covering the floor. I knew it instantly for a children’s play room for there were toys scattered about: a doll, a wooden horse, a branch chipped crudely into the shape of a sword. The children were all here and they froze as we entered, yawning faces snapping around to look at us with big, innocent eyes. When I realised there were more children here than had met us in the hallway, I felt strangely shrivelled inside; Crediton had been a good place once but it was doubtful these children would see it again.
Mrs Miller lifted a finger and pressed it to her lips. The smallest boy – who until now had been huddling close to the girl I’d taken for his elder sister – looked set to start sobbing. He opened his arms wide, reaching out, and the old woman hobbled over to lift him up, whispering words I couldn’t hear but which seemed to soothe him. I saw the bundle she’d been carrying lying on the deerskin rug. It had fallen open and its contents had been investigated thoroughly. They were papers. Papers with words printed on them and a woodcut impression of some malevolent face consumed in fire. In the dreary light I couldn’t make out the words. I crouched and reached out to take one but a hand slapped down onto mine from the eldest of the girls. I saw that she had a stack of the papers beside her on the floor where she was sitting. On top of her little pile sat a thimble and thread, the sort that might be used for darning a sock.
‘Might I see?’ I asked her.
The girl shook her head fiercely. I considered that, were I to reach out and take one of the papers from her, she would sink her teeth into my arm and not let go until she tasted blood. Such is the fierce pride of children.
‘I can’t do it alone, Mister Falkland.’ Mrs Miller sounded different now. Gone was her ferocity, gone was her bile. She handed the little boy back to his sister and tried to usher me out of the room. I stood fast. ‘Please, Mister Falkland! I know what I promised but I can’t. Haven’t you ever made a promise you couldn’t keep?’
I promised once that I would never stop thinking about my wife and children, that I would be back as swiftly as possible and would always protect them. I supposed that was a promise I’d broken but I had no idea to what Mrs Miller was referring; yet she looked at me with something verging on terror. I had an unsettling feeling that it wasn’t sympathy that had made her agree to show me the children; it was fear of what I might have done had she refused.
‘I would like to see the papers,’ I began. I didn’t want to let her know she was wrong about me, not yet, not until I’d found out the reason for her fear. This time, when I bent down, no one struck my hand aside. I took a paper from the bag and lifted it to a candle, cupping my hand around the flame. I studied the printing. The words ‘YOU WILL BE DISCOVERED’ were printed in thick black lettering at the top of the page, still sticky to the touch. Beneath was the woodcut of the malevolent face – all eyebrows with dark slits for eyes and a cruel pursed mouth underneath springing forth from a fountain of flame. It was difficult to judge whether this was a person being consumed by the fire, somebody trying to escape it or some sort of devil being birthed.
I turned the paper over. There was nothing on the reverse; but when I studied the room more carefully, I saw that several other children had piles at their sides with thimbles and needles and threads perched on top. ‘I want to see the rest,’ I said.
‘Sir?’
‘The rest!’ I said, my voice climbing in pitch. ‘There has to be more. What are these children stitching together if it’s only one leaf?’
Mrs Miller took a handful of pages and passed them to me, then swept the children into one corner of the room and put herself between me and them. ‘You have to understand,’ she said. ‘It’s my hands. They’re . . .’ She lifted her hands to show me but I was too busy scanning the pages of what was to be the pamphlet to pay her gnarled fingers much attention. ‘Finished,’ she breathed. ‘Done. Some mornings I can hardly hold a spoon. How am I supposed to do all this stitching alone with fingers like this? They do good work, sir.’
Her last words brought me back to the present. I held the pamphlet hard and looked at her. ‘You do the binding of the pocket Bibles as well?’
She nodded but there was a flicker on her face now as if, for the first time, she was starting to question me. Why, she seemed to be thinking, did I not already know?
‘And nobody knows these children are doing the stitching?’
‘Nobody but you, sir.’ When she next spoke her voice throbbed again with the simmering rage I’d had from her out in the lane. ‘And I beg you,’ she went on, though there was no begging in her tone, ‘you must keep it secret. These children cannot starve. These children must be here to see the end.’
‘The end?’
‘Of the war,’ she said. ‘They must survive.’
‘So they pay you to bind their books and stitch up their pamphlets, is that how it goes? And with their coin you feed the little ones?’
Her face crumpled. Whether she was trying to hide tears or rein herself in from clawing out at me and filling the air with curses, I could not say. ‘They must go on paying,’ she said. ‘If not for me, for the children. Do you have children of your own, Mister Falkland? Are you at least a godly man?’ She stopped. I was glad of it, for her words were running together to make a babble. ‘Bethany, come. Explain yourself to Mister Falkland. Tell him your story. If he has a heart at all it will be exposed if only you tell him . . .’ She pressed in on me and I flinched away.
‘In the name of God, woman, be quiet!’ I rounded on her. Had I been a different sort of soldier then I might even have lifted my fist but I’d seen too many soldiers reaping their spoils of war to ever lift my hand to a woman, no matter how incessant she was with her shrieking. With a hush at last, I began to read.
The words were familiar enough though I judged there were subtle changes. For the most part it was the late Protestation, part of the traditional oaths that all members of the Church had to make. I’d seen the oath before in the days when I first came to London to join the King’s armies with Caro’s father and I quickly realised what was missing. There was mention of Parliament here but no mention of the oath to the King as rightful head of the Church. Whoever was printing these pamphlets had cut it out. When I understood, I admit I reeled a little, for such a thing could not make sense. Come the spring the King would have to come to terms – I had no doubt of that now having seen the power simmering in this New Model – but he remained the ruler of both kingdom and Church by divine right. Not even Cromwell and Fairfax would dare counter that. Neither man was a heretic.
I looked at the next page. Here were more woodcut pictures, more flames, more malevolent faces. This time they were not people who appeared out of the fire but fantastical creatures the like of which I’d not seen in the real, physical world, and doubted any man in the kingdom had either. If such creatures did exist, it was only in the stories of seafarers and explorers – but here the beasts were given names: Jarmara was a savage-looking dog, Newes a polecat with impish features.
Another page opened with big, bold letters and beneath them a picture that was familiar. In the woodcut stood a simple prince, drawn in stark lines wi
th his mouth wide open in a scream beside an upturned dog, a carcass with its legs sticking in the air, and a man standing above it with a musket on his back.
The words read:
I’d heard this story before. Prince Rupert’s terrier, so they said, was whelped by a Water Witch. It was the kind of story that might have been believed in Yorkshire, where men are simple and superstitious, but never in London, Oxford or Manchester where men are not given easily to mindless terror. I pushed the papers into my pocket along with the blank pocket Bible. ‘Why did Thomas Fletcher blow himself up with a granadoe?’ I asked.
Mrs Miller turned to the children. She crouched down as far as her aged knees would allow her and made them a rush of promises as she shooed them away. All the same they seemed to take an age to finally leave the room, the littlest one having to be pried away. When we were alone, she looked at me with the most contempt I’d ever seen, all of her wrinkles creased up, her eyes sunken deep into her face to tell me what she made of me.
‘You’re not from them, are you?’
‘You can start by telling me who them are, and we can take it from there.’
The old woman didn’t look at me. Instead she flittered around the room, gathering up the piles of printed pages and stacking them neatly in a corner. ‘Mister Falkland, I’d have been better off running, finding a place your sort wouldn’t come, some remote farmhouse, somewhere with a sheep for milking and a hen for eggs. But . . .’ She paused. ‘In the end, sir, I’ve been here all my life. I’ve seen people come and go. I thought the New Model was just another season.’
The way she said it was perfectly clear: she was now of the opinion that the New Model was not just something that would come and then go. The New Model had changed things forever. I feared she was right.
‘Poor Tom. They had him thrown in with a gang of pikemen. He was drilling with them and . . . He was a boy, you understand. A delicate one at that. No muscle on him. A whole head shorter than any other lad in Crediton. And there he was, trying to hold a pike twice as tall as him, tumbling every time he tried to join a drill. I watched him one day. He couldn’t have lasted a march with this army, let alone a battle. I’d started taking the children by then. They found their way from all over. It started small but . . . Well, children whisper, and it was better they have a place to go to than end up serving common soldiers like squires. Tom heard too. He’d come here sometimes. Not for food or shelter or . . .’ Her words trailed off as if she could not contemplate the sadness of it. ‘He just wanted something familiar. Somebody from the old world.’
‘Did he say anything that made you think he might . . .’ I faltered. I did not know how to phrase it.
‘Throw himself on a granadoe and blow himself to bits?’
I nodded.
‘Don’t be daft. If I’d have seen it coming I might have stopped him, don’t you think? They quickly kicked him out of the pikemen. He couldn’t ride a horse so he’d never make a cavalryman either. They set him to guarding the gunpowder stores. All he was fit for, they said, but it suited him well enough. They’d taken over the church—’
‘I’ve seen it. Stacked up there like they want to wipe the building off the face of the kingdom.’
‘They consider it a blemish. They’d banish our good priest from the camp altogether if they could. I think they were too superstitious to do it – and these the very people calling us papists and witches and worse.’ She kept moving around the room, picking things up and putting them down again, as if arranging them in some sort of proper order whose design seemed to me no different to the one the children had left behind. ‘Then some new soldiers moved into the Fletcher house. Young ones. Until then it had been older men, forty years old and more. I wondered what was going on so I found myself going down there. Well, you’ve seen it yourself. They caught me snooping but it didn’t matter. I could help them, I said. They needed someone to stitch the papers together. Someone to bind the books. They told me they’d even pay me. The New Model doesn’t want for money and I had the children filling the house by now and hated the sound of them crying for empty stomachs. What else could I do?’
She seemed to invite my derision, but stitching up a few pamphlets was hardly a crime. I imagined far worse things happened in this bloated camp almost every day.
‘It was no great secret, so I found, that they were making those pocket books of theirs in that house. One day I was coming out of there, smuggling out some papers for the children to help me with the stitching, when Tom was standing there hisself, all alone in the middle of the lane with the snow piled up around his boots. I’d never seen him look so full of anger. Like a boy three times his size. He came pounding down the lane, wanting to know what I was doing, what was going on in his house. I told him it was those books they all had, begged him that it didn’t matter, just to come home with me, but there was something terrible behind his eyes. I wondered had he been drinking? I don’t suppose he’d touched a drop before in his life but, whatever it was, something had given him fire. I tried to catch him at the church that night but he’d locked himself into the cellars with all that gunpowder and refused to come out.
‘I didn’t see him for a few days after. Then I went down to the house one morning to gather more papers, things I could bring back for the children to stitch, and there he was. The other soldiers seemed to know him this time. They didn’t treat him badly, not near as bad as I’ve seen in this camp. I think they thought him a nonsense. Something to be forgotten. Or tolerated – like boys sometimes do their younger brothers. They had him taking out their pamphlets, Tom and some other boys his age, sharing them with soldiers all across camp. They got wine in return and a soldier can buy almost anything he likes if he’s got a full skin of wine.’ She looked immeasurably sad. If I hadn’t realised it before, suddenly I saw how very old, how very tired, she truly was. ‘I didn’t worry about little Tom Fletcher after that. A boy has to become a man and find a way to live in the world. Especially when the world doesn’t know how to treat itself. These are the end times, Mister Falkland. You’ll have seen it yourself. I was only happy Tom had found a way to live with it.’
‘Until he turned up dead.’
There were tears shining in her eyes. I’d not meant to make her cry. I stepped forward, thinking I might put a consoling hand on her shoulder, but she shuffled back and left my hand hanging in the air.
‘They still distribute the pamphlets?’ I asked.
She nodded. ‘It went more slowly after Tom died, but yes. There’s a pamphlet tucked inside every pocket Bible and more besides.’
I could hear the children gathered in the hallway like dogs punished by their master, scrabbling at the door to be let in, all ready to grovel. I opened it and the flood of them almost swept me over as they came past on either side and even through my legs to get back to Mrs Miller. The oldest girl moved more slowly than the rest, considering me with a withering eye. I wanted to tell her: this isn’t my fault; I didn’t make your nanny cry; I didn’t throw her friend on top of a lit granadoe.
‘Mrs Miller,’ I said. ‘The printing press and the books, then, they are well known?’
She nodded. ‘Black Tom hisself has spoken of it.’
‘I will not tell anyone of your secret, that you bring these papers out of the old Fletcher house for your children to stitch. It is no concern of mine at all. But it’s not only the pocket books you stitch, is it? The pamphlets you have with you now with pictures of devils. They are not The Soldier’s Pocket Bible. I will ask one thing, Mrs Miller: who is it who pays you? Who prints them?’
She was smothered by the children. They formed a protective guard around her. I had a terrible feeling I could have used a guard of my own. ‘I dare not say,’ she whispered.
‘Black Tom?’ But I saw at once that I was wrong. A ghostly tremor moved in my spine and the image of a face floated into my vision. It wasn’t a face I wanted to see. ‘This soldier. Does he have wild black hair? A strange kind of grace?’
>
Mrs Miller nodded. ‘You’ve met . . .’ She breathed a little sigh, almost one of relief. ‘Well, sir, you’d do well to pretend your paths never crossed. Edmund Carew might look a soft enough man, but meeting him is the biggest regret of my long, long life.’
CHAPTER 19
The house was silent when I got back. In the scullery, Kate Cain had some watery soup on the boil even though it was now the dead of night. She’d waited for me. Her face, still swollen, showed her bruises more darkly than I remembered. Still, she welcomed me fondly and stirred up whatever had settled at the bottom of the soup for me to have my fill. There was rabbit in there and it sat welcome and warm in my stomach. I made sure she ate as well.
‘Is Warbeck here?’ I asked her. Her glance to the ceiling was answer enough. ‘Kate, I must ask you a question.’
‘You can ask,’ she returned, ‘but I won’t promise an answer.’ She spoke with a smile.
‘They asked you to spy on me,’ I said. ‘That much I know. But I must ask you – have they asked you to spy on anybody else in this camp?’
The question seemed to throw her off guard. She’d been standing at the oven and turned, cautiously, with her green eyes twinkling behind her beaten mask. ‘I’m indebted to Black Tom. I’m indebted to Purkiss, even though it was his commands that did this.’ She gestured at the markings on her face and I winced, for shame. ‘Without what they pay me, I’d . . .’ She turned away from me again. ‘I’d be one of the Admonished, Falkland. A camp whore!’ After she barked out the word she seemed to wrestle with herself. At last she let out a deep sigh. ‘You already know, Falkland,’ she said more softly this time, coming to sit beside me. ‘All the men I keep here, I’m sworn to spy on them. There were others before. Now it’s you and Master Warbeck.’