by S. J. Deas
We passed close by Mrs Miller’s home and came through the last of the Crediton cottages. The sprawl of the encampment tents spread out before me. Even at this hour of night it felt like day, for the whiteness of the snow made the tents visible to the very horizon, brought close by the encroaching blizzard. There was movement in the camp too as soldiers, stirred from restless sleep by the snowfall, rushed to stoke their fires and make sure they saw it through the night. Men can get used to the worst deprivations. I’d learned that in prison.
We followed a weaving trail through the tents to join a track I’d taken once before on that very first night with Miss Cain. She was without doubt a better escort than the surgeon Lucas but at least I knew where I was going. It already seemed so very long ago.
We left the camp and crossed the acre of land beyond its border. We plunged above our knees into the snow. Drifts were building again. If the blizzard continued through the night then in places those drifts would climb as high as my head by morning. In the distance I saw the witching tree. Thinking of its name like that set new mechanisms whirring in my head. The word witch seemed, all of a sudden, to have different and less idle meanings. It was probably trees like this that Matthew Hopkins used to string his sorcerers up while baying crowds gathered round. Tonight the tree was a black silhouette crowned in deeper and deeper white. As we approached it seemed to grow more stark, to leap out at me, pitch-black against the swirling snow.
Twenty yards away and with the falling snow a shifting curtain between us and the old oak, Lucas put out his hand and bade me stop. No sooner had I done so than the snow began to settle on me, frosting my eyebrows and eyelashes, caking my skin.
‘He’s waiting,’ Lucas said.
I squinted. There was another figure in front of the tree. That was all he was to me now, but something made me move my frozen hand to the handle of the knife at my back. My fingers were stiff but they closed around it tightly. It was enough to know I could draw it if I needed. ‘You’re not coming?’ I asked.
Lucas shook his head. ‘I want no part of this, Falkland. Besides, the cold will kill us as easily as a granadoe being lit.’ He shivered.
I nodded and left him behind. It took an age to cross those measly twenty yards. The snow had not been walked upon – where the man at the tree had come from, I couldn’t yet tell – and I had to kick my way through. Where the granadoe had exploded, the depression in the land still showed, the snow piled higher in the crater so that I plunged suddenly and stumbled, falling into what felt like a pit. When I recovered my feet, the snow in the crater reached my waist. I fought my way free but the ice clung to me and I could feel it seeping into my bones.
The figure waited on the opposite side of the tree but moved around as I approached. I was glad we didn’t stand beneath the very branch where the brothers and Hotham had hanged themselves high. I stopped my eyes from even glancing that way; I was cold enough without having to bear another chill.
‘I’m glad that you could come.’ The voice was measured. Calm. I knew it at once.
‘Carew,’ I whispered.
‘I’m glad to meet you again, Falkland,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘Would that it were in less trying circumstances.’ His voice didn’t tremble as I knew mine would, in spite of the cold. He moved nearer but I couldn’t see his face. All around us the world was illuminated by snow – but here, underneath the crown of white lodged in the branches, we were only outlines in black. He held himself like a lord, less like the roundhead pikeman I’d first taken him for and more like the fey cavaliers with whose image they mocked the King’s army. He had the vestiges of a London accent – though it seemed to my ears a tone relentlessly rehearsed – and when I took his hand, I found it limp this time, the touch too light. Perhaps it was only that both of our hands were frozen inside our gloves but something seemed awry in that pose.
‘I was told you knew things about Thomas Fletcher,’ I said. ‘So what’s this about? And why the forsaken hour?’
‘A sorry tale.’
‘A tale that might easily have been told in front of a fire with ale in our hands and pottage on our plates . . .’
‘And have the whole camp hear?’ he replied, rising in a shrill peak but holding back from laughter. ‘No good could come from that.’
‘The surgeon’s quarters then. Surely we might have spoken there?’
I was suddenly aware of the pamphlet still stuffed into my pocket. I pictured Carew and Hotham working the press, arranging the letters, fixing the paper. In my head, Thomas Fletcher scurried around them, obeying orders thrown at him from left and right.
‘Jacob would have been disturbed,’ Carew replied. ‘And there are too many boys lying there. I don’t want the story told too freely.’
‘I know you knew Thomas, Carew.’ A wind flurried up, throwing a veil of snow between us, and for a moment it robbed my breath. ‘But you know I know as well.’
‘I wasn’t sure you had recognised me.’
In truth I hadn’t. It was only as I looked at him now that it occurred to me: he had exactly the same lean, willowy figure as the hooded man I’d chased from the Fletcher house before I was drawn, instead, to old Beatrice Miller. Carew had been there all the while. And Beatrice Miller had known it too and quietly never said a word. Somehow it felt as if we were parrying blades, with me forced onto the back foot. ‘You might have told me,’ I ventured, ‘when I first came to see Jacob, that you knew Fletcher as well. You were not honest, Carew. Why was that?’
I could see him weighing up the words he was about to say. ‘You must forgive me, Falkland. These are trying times.’
‘All the same, it was a lie. You told me you knew only his story, yet all the while he was your messenger boy, delivering your –’ I checked myself from saying pamphlets: there was still a chance I didn’t know that part of the story – ‘Bibles to the soldiers.’
‘That was how White Tom and Jacob knew each other.’ Carew came closer to me. I hated to admit it but I was thankful. Together we formed our own windbreak, turning against the worst of the chill. No longer did we look at the witching tree; instead, we gazed over the endless white. ‘We didn’t know it was Fletcher’s house. Not to begin with. He was just some simpering royalist whelp who started loitering around. But we had our use for him. We were turning out more books of verse than we—’
‘The printing press,’ I interjected. ‘Where does it come from?’
Carew’s lips curled. He seemed to be enjoying a joke at my expense. ‘Why, Falkland,’ he said, as if the answer was so obvious that a child might have known it. ‘It belongs to the New Model.’
‘The army has its own press?’
‘How else is it to lead its soldiers? We are not barbarians. We are –’ and here he could not but grin, for he was driving a stake into what he presumed was my unending loyalty to the King and Prince Rupert – ‘not minions. There can be little opportunity for a printing press when the army is campaigning. But in a winter like this the contraption has a part to play that is much, much bigger than any individual soldier.’
There was truth in this. He didn’t know that I already understood, but he wasn’t only talking about Bibles and books of pocket verse. The pamphlets, I was beginning to understand, were as much a way of controlling the men, cut from disparate towns and disparate militias, as was drilling and the rule of soldier’s law. The pamphlets cut away all mention of the King from the traditional Oaths. They filled their pages with images of Prince Rupert as a devil and his dog as his familiar and other such. These were not idle thoughts. These were careful manipulations. Yet as I looked at him, I was suddenly aware of how young he was. War is a time for young men to make bold, to climb high, to be ambitious and stake claims from which they can build their future lives. I suppose, in a way, that was what I’d done, though I’d not planned on it and didn’t care much for where it had brought me. All the same, Carew did not seem to me to be a man in any way in charge of this army. For all his airs, he wa
s common soldiery.
It dawned on me then that perhaps Cromwell wasn’t the astute tactician he seemed. If a weapon as powerful as the printing press – for, make no mistake about it, this was a weapon far more powerful than any granadoe – was left for boys to employ, then the New Model was not as clever as he believed.
‘Why you?’ I asked.
The question must have caught him off guard. ‘Falkland?’
‘Why are you running the press?’
‘Not me,’ he said. ‘Jacob. He is an esteemed sort of man. Knows the presses inside and out from his days in London. He fancied himself a poet, you see. Or, if not a poet, a polemicist. When we came to camp he was asked to help in the binding of the Bibles but it quickly became clear that he was much more useful than that. He asked me to aid him.’ Carew paused. A shiver ran through him; we’d been out in the cold too long. ‘He’s fortunate that he did. If I’d not been working the press with him, I would not have been there to save his life.’
I remembered what Carew had told me the last time we met – that they had been working a watch around the camp, that Hotham had taken himself to the witching tree where we now stood and strung himself up there only for Carew to have a vision from God and come running with his fellows to cut him down. My eyes began to stray back to the branch from which the rope had dangled but Carew ploughed on:
‘It was because of Thomas Fletcher,’ he said. ‘It was all because of him. You know, by now, that the house we use for printing was where he grew up. Well, he came there often. We took pity on him at first. He was hardly more than a boy and certainly he didn’t have the ideas and thoughts that might belong to a man. So we thought it little danger to take him in. We did not let him near the press but he was useful enough as a messenger—’
‘And a courier.’
Carew ploughed on, heedless of my interruption. ‘He became something of a little brother to us. One night we had a wineskin and offered it to him. Do you know, I believe that until that moment the only wine to ever touch his lips had been from some secret communion in that treacherous little church of theirs. Still, he took to it with aplomb. You will think it cruel but it became a game for us, to taunt him and see how far he might go. We decided to share some stories. Jacob is a man with many stories to tell and I will admit to having my own tall tales, but Thomas Fletcher – well, a more naïve, hopeless boy you’ll never meet. You see, Falkland, it became clear to us that Thomas Fletcher was innocent of things a soldier must not be innocent of. I don’t mean killing a man . . .’ He said it with a lascivious grin, his mouth open a fraction too wide like a glutton contemplating his supper.
‘I know what you mean, Carew,’ I said.
‘There are lots of sorts around here to take that innocence from a boy. So we took him to see a girl we knew.’
It didn’t strike me as right that a boy like Carew, so fiercely Puritan in his outlook, would have fraternised with camp whores. I remembered distinctly the way he’d looked on the Day of Admonishment, not baying like the rest of the crowd but somehow pleased nonetheless. I met his eye. ‘Then I’d like to talk to her. Who was she?’
I had it in mind that he’d answer ‘Mary,’ and before he’d even spoken the word, ideas exploded and reformed in my head. If Fletcher had wandered into the same ménage as Richard Wildman and his brother then perhaps there was something other than their Catholicism to draw all these boys together after all: three boys enamoured of the same whore? Jacob Hotham the one who spun the spider’s web . . . ?
Carew must have sensed something for he paused before going on. ‘Her name, as I recall, was Beth. She was a dark little thing. I hear she’s been following us since long before Naseby but, as you’ll warrant, I had little interest in making her acquaintance. She was pleased to take Thomas in. We thought perhaps they would not do anything. Thomas Fletcher was certainly the sort of boy who would rather be cuddled than treated with a man’s proper respect. But he took to seeing her. He even had a little pay, now, to shower her with gifts.
‘It was our fault, Falkland. We took him to the wrong whore. She had her suitors among the soldiers and there was one who fancied her his property. We didn’t know it until after but he was the one who brought Fletcher to this spot. He was the one who struck a light against that granadoe. Thomas Fletcher was not a suicide. He was murdered.’
I let it sink in. The bitterness of the winter had grown up around me and I felt rooted to the spot. Not even the fire I felt at hearing this story could thaw me out. ‘Hotham?’
‘He tried to hang himself as penance.’ Carew nodded thoughtfully. ‘I think he thought it fitting.’
‘Yet you . . . you did not feel the same thing?’
‘I have a different way of looking at life than Jacob Hotham, Falkland. I was not the one to light the granadoe. I regret what we did but I will not burn in Hell for it.’
At last I lifted my boot from the snow. My left leg felt dead but I flexed it over and again until it screamed out – then, at least, I knew it was alive. Hotham hanged himself as a penance? I found it hard to countenance.
‘You look pained, Falkland.’
‘If all you say is true, why not come forward?’ I turned around and took two faltering steps away from the tree. As I turned I was drawn to the branch where the boys had hanged themselves. If it seemed unfair that Thomas Fletcher had come to such an ignoble but ordinary end, it seemed more unfair still that, at the end of everything, the deaths were not all tied together as I’d thought. I’d been sent here to investigate suicides, and suicides were all I’d found. There was nothing more remarkable in this camp than too many frightened, starving boys, plucked from every last corner of the kingdom, flung into one place and told to exist.
Then I saw the rope hanging from the branch. I’d climbed up that trunk only a few days ago. I’d nervously edged along the bough and inspected that rope. I’d lifted its severed end and run my hands up and down its length. I’d tried to imagine what it might have been like for those boys. I’d fingered the frayed end and wondered who had cut the last one down.
But now, when I looked at the rope, I saw no severed end. I saw a loop of rope tied in a slipknot. I saw a noose freshly ready.
My eyes fixed upon Carew; and as I did I saw a harsh resolve fix upon his face. I knew, then, how all this story was merely another lie. This story of some whore and a jealous boy was just that – a story – and a poor one too, and Carew knew from my look that I’d seen through it. The reason he’d called me here was suddenly clear. ‘Carew,’ I said, my voice quiet with condemnation, ‘Fletcher died after Hotham had been cut down.’
He seemed untroubled that I’d seen through him. ‘The other two,’ he whispered. ‘Those two papist boys? They were more . . . complicated. I’m sorry, Falkland, that it comes to this. I’d hoped to avoid it, truly I did.’
In his hands he held a dagger. In the darkness beyond the tree stood three other men. Suddenly I wasn’t cold any more.
CHAPTER 21
‘Carew,’ I said. The word came out strangled, ripped away from my lips by a sudden gust blowing past. ‘Think carefully about what you’re doing, Carew. Somebody finds me strung up here, they won’t think it’s suicide. They won’t think I was one of your royalist boys beaten and beaten until he couldn’t take it any more.’ I stepped back, spreading my legs to get a firmer grounding. It had been too long since I was in a fight. Even at Abingdon when they captured me there had been little of it left. I reached to the small of my back for the knife I’d hidden there but felt only my naked flesh. It had fallen away when I plunged into the crater the granadoe had left; I’d been too frozen to notice. I looked about for anything I might use to defend myself but all I saw was a second knife on Carew’s belt.
‘Beaten?’ He laughed. ‘Who has been beaten?’
‘You’ll bring Hell on this camp, Carew.’
He came a step closer, mirroring my every action. In a sudden reflection of snow I glimpsed his eyes. They didn’t have the calmnes
s I’d seen in them before. Now they were wide.
‘You do know who sent me here?’ I asked. I didn’t like invoking the name but the three other figures were close to Carew now and I felt as if an unstoppable wave was about to pound me down. I’d never been to sea but I had the vivid idea that this was what it was like to be shipwrecked. ‘Cromwell isn’t the man to ignore it. He sent me as his investigator. Killing me is like . . .’
‘Perhaps,’ Carew said, his voice barely a whisper, ‘that is precisely the point.’
I didn’t have time to consider what he meant. They came forward together as if ordered by words I couldn’t hear. Two of the other figures broke away, vaulting through the deep snow to come at me from behind, while Carew and the last of them advanced from the front. I had only my fists to protect me but, nevertheless, I whirled, desperate to keep them at bay, stretching out as if my forearm itself was a sabre with which I might cut them in two. I cast an eye back for Lucas – I didn’t think he was a part of this – but he was gone or lost to the snow. There seemed little point in crying out.
Like a snake coiling around its prey, the others encircled me. All the while the face of Carew hung in front of me. ‘You would bring me out here,’ I said, ‘to tell me your tale, only to string me up anyway? Carew, you’re not thinking . . .’ I saw the way he held that dagger in his hand. Here was a man not used to trading blows. The men with him were more battle ready – I judged them second-rank pikemen; too strong and stocky to waste as fodder in the front row – but Carew was the one with the dagger. I could use that to my advantage.
‘Only when you would not believe it,’ said Carew.
As one they began to close. When they were only feet away I sprang and launched myself directly at Carew, coming up from underneath him so I could sweep his dagger arm out of the way. To his credit he hung on to the blade even as I forced his arms above his head and barrelled him backward. Together we plunged into the snow. Straddling him I had the better of it, but it wouldn’t last long before the other men were on me. The snow hampered them, though, and I risked bringing my fist back to smash into Carew’s face. As I hit him we sank further still into the drift. I drove a fistful of snow into his mouth. He bucked back, trying to throw me off, but now he was choking. I wrestled the dagger out of his hand. It dropped and vanished into the snow. I seized the blade from Carew’s belt and rolled away; even as I did, the first of his henchmen was on top of me. I kicked out with the flat of my boot and pushed him back. He didn’t topple over – he was no fool – but it gave me enough room to haul myself to my feet. Thankful that the tree was at my back, I used it to drag myself around. There was no way I could fight them off. I had one on either side while the third helped the choking Carew back to his feet. ‘Do you boys have any idea,’ I gasped, ‘of what you’re doing? You might as well put the rope around your own neck. Cromwell will see you hang.’