William Falkland 01 - The Royalist (11 page)

I thought of Hotham. ‘I think, Miss Cain, that they suffered a great deal.’

CHAPTER 11

I’d seen nothing more of Purkiss since I’d entered the surgeon’s house and now I saw nothing of Warbeck after he’d flung his accusations at Kate. I hoped he’d set off to fight through the snow back to London and the warmth of Cromwell’s court. However, I’d promised to report to Fairfax as my investigation progressed and at least half of me expected to see Warbeck there, dining at Black Tom’s table.

I left behind my empty bowl of Miss Cain’s crow soup and took with me a stomach eager for more. Hunger is something every soldier knows, but there’s nothing like a small meal to set a man’s belly rumbling for something more substantial. In the November twilight I passed the silent inn towards the middle of the town. A small crowd of soldiers had gathered in the square where the dead man hung, his corpse now covered with frost so that he looked like a devil. Some were wearing their red coats but some were wearing black. A smaller group were wearing mismatched bits of armour and clothing, obviously scavenged off royalists they had killed or the bodies of their fallen friends. Most armies I’d seen were as ragtag as this so it didn’t bother me in the slightest. Seeing the men in red coats, though, that
did
trouble me. It had been men in red coats who had cornered me in the farmhouse on the night I was captured.

I meant to avoid the gathering but as I entered the square the crowd grew so great that I could hardly get past without being swallowed whole. It seemed that two sides were quickly developing. One side had most of the red coats and the men wearing all black. The other, though there were red coats there too, was composed of those soldiers in ragtag, scavenged dress. I’d seen an alley a little short of the square between the inn and what I took to be a hanging shed and turned back towards it. I had no desire to be caught in a soldiers’ brawl. When I reached it there were already men clambering onto the roof of the shed to watch.

The alley took me around the back of the inn past the stables and out to the southern side of the crowd. I came to the other end and was about to head to the market square and its tents and lean-tos when, all at once, the crowd became silent. Over my shoulder I saw a bonfire had been lit and now it spilled a fiery light onto them. I couldn’t fathom why they might have made such a pyre in the middle of the square, not when all the houses in Crediton went cold for lack of kindling. A curiosity got the better of me then; I inched my way back to the edge of the crowd where a thin, reedy voice was making a proclamation. I couldn’t hear the words but I saw the flash of coins being passed from hand to hand. This wasn’t a common soldiers’ brawl then. This was a duel, and the soldiers were betting on it.

I found a likely subject, a slight boy in an oversized red coat. He stood with the ragtag soldiers but could see nothing of what was going on himself because he was so small.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Who’s asking?’ he piped up.

‘Falkland,’ I said. ‘I’m cavalry.’

‘Cavalry and you’ve come
here
to see
this
?’

‘What do you think?’ I said. ‘I’m starved of entertainments up there.’

The boy took to this line of reasoning with aplomb. ‘You’d never get me on a horse,’ he said. ‘When I go into battle I want to be on my own two feet.’ He stood tall to try and peer into the middle of the crowd. I could see an arena had developed there with jostling men all around. ‘It’s one of the newly pressed boys. Said the wrong thing and now he’s got to fight for it. My money’s on David. He tore chunks out of men at Naseby with only his hands. I should know. I saw it. He won’t leave that cavalier whoreson standing.’

‘The pressed boy,’ I began. ‘You mean to say he’s a royalist?’

‘Place is crawling with them and it’s only getting worse. I’ve seen them give a good show every now and then. But a cavalier isn’t born to fight, is he? He’s born to strut around his estate and preen in front of his mirror.’

‘What will happen if he loses?’

‘It’s
when
he loses. They’ll give him a good hiding and take his clothes, I should think. He won’t be so proud about being a cavalier when they’ve all seen his pizzle shrunken up from the cold! Look, get out of my way, would you? This thing’s about to start.’

I decided not to stay for the fighting and walked away without looking back. Over my shoulder I could chart the course of it by the way the crowd groaned and roared. As best I could tell, the loser barely landed a blow and it was over before I reached the end of the lane. The raucous aftermath of the contest faded behind me.

I crossed the market square and headed east. As I passed the church I saw there were guards outside tonight and wondered why they had not been there in the morning. Perhaps the priest and I had been seen sneaking around and somebody had decided to double the watch? Beyond it, the easternmost parts of Crediton were as silent as a winter night should be. I saw lights behind windows, and fires burning in the mouths of the tents and the lean-tos built between the cottages, but I rarely saw a person. Too cold for snow, my breath turned into crystals of ice. On the outskirts of the town, towards the end of the cottages, I again saw a sorrowful lonely watchman standing guard by the road. I pitied him. His feet must be near frozen. I hurried on and turned down the track past the fields where the horses were kept, feeling a strange pang of pity for them, too, remembering what Miss Cain had told me and wondering if the unfortunate chosen ones had already been taken.

I crossed the little bridge over the river. There were fires inside Fairfax’s farmhouse but there were border fires lit outside too, circles of stones with fires built low within. As I approached I saw that guards had been placed around the farmyard’s edges. I wondered if Fairfax fancied himself some sort of prince now. There had once been a time, I knew, when he was one of the King’s bannermen; but we were all loyal once, I suppose. I felt the sprawling camp on my shoulder and something forced me to look around. There was nothing to see but all the same I felt eyes on me. Not the eyes of some secret watcher lurking in the dark but of the army as a thing, as a monster, a living creature beyond the men it claimed. It was a thought I’d had before, lined up in ranks with a thousand other men, but I’d never felt it as keenly as I did now.

The guards didn’t stir until I was close. I thought them particularly useless. When I was in Yorkshire with the King, few men could get this near to him without a horn being sounded or the clash of steel upon steel. Prince Rupert was easier with his men but even he would have shuddered at the thought that a stranger might get this close. I wondered if these guards already knew who I was but it seemed not: the first to meet me, a scrawny youth surely too young to have left his mother’s teat, listened without any hint of recognition as I told him. He turned on his heel and beckoned me to follow. At the door a second guard – a burly simpleton but at least he was more frightening than the first whelp – made a show of searching me for weapons. He didn’t do a very good job and I might easily have concealed a dagger in each boot. He didn’t take me in, though, but led me around to the back of the farmhouse and bade me enter.

Inside, Black Tom received me. This little back room wasn’t as stark as the hall where we’d first been introduced but there was still something austere about the bare stone walls, unadorned with any weaving or painting, and a floor as open as the earth. There was a small table and chair. Writing implements were stacked neatly in one corner but I didn’t suppose that Fairfax, like Cromwell, spent his nights writing letters to the mothers of soldiers who had died – I don’t mean to say that Cromwell regretted the loss of life any the more; only that he knew better how to turn it to his advantage.

Fairfax wasn’t alone. The room was lit in each corner by tall candelabras, and in its hearth by a small fire where I was surprised to see coals. In each of the pools of light stood another man. The first I recognised as Purkiss. I stared at him and he returned my gaze with a cold, flat look. I understood Warbeck’s derision now: Purkiss had played at being a fool and played me for one too. He’d been good enough that I’d fallen for it.

The second man was Warbeck himself. He tipped me a curious, knowing look as I entered, as if we two were secret lovers arranging a tryst. There was no sign now of that hatred I’d seen in him in front of Kate. The final man I hadn’t met before. He was tall with red hair and a fuzzy, Irish look about him. If he really were an Irishman then he was in the wrong place. Cromwell would have told him: all Irishmen go to Hell.

Fairfax was the last to look up. He did so as if he’d been pondering it some time. ‘Gentlemen,’ he began. ‘I believe we have all met Master William James Falkland.’

The red-haired gentleman shook his head, ‘I have yet to have the pleasure.’ We shook hands – it was more than any of the others had done – and the gentleman introduced himself as Richard Baxter. When he told me he was the army’s chaplain, I wasn’t surprised; he had the same methodical, considered way about him as did the scalded priest from the church.

‘I’ve not known an army to have its own chaplain before,’ I began.

‘You’ve been away from the world some time, Falkland,’ Fairfax said. ‘An army without God is a rabble. A general can lead his men onto the field but that is not the only kind of leadership this New Model of ours calls for. The men who fight for our cause shall have leadership for their spirits as well.’

He spoke as if he was waging a war on behalf of Heaven itself. Half of me wanted to pour derision on it, the idea of a godly host marching across the kingdom, rallying up its people and putting them to war. But a spark somewhere deep inside made me stay my tongue. The idea, preposterous as it might be, was like a seed of monstrous dread, the kind a young child has when his mother puts him to bed that sprouts from nothing and grows at frightful speed and never lets him go to sleep. Ideas can be terrible things when brought to men with the means of making them happen.

‘The rest,’ Black Tom began, ‘you have already met: Mr Warbeck must return shortly to take our news back to London. And Alfred –’ here he gestured to the imp in the corner of the room who grumbled behind his beard – ‘was most affronted that you spurned his attention this morning. He was instructed to help.’

I didn’t doubt it, but it was clear to me now that this ‘help’ mainly entailed keeping Fairfax appraised of my movements.

‘I don’t like disobeying instructions,’ grunted Purkiss.

There was silence.

‘I have come to make my report, as I swore,’ I said.

Fairfax waved me away. ‘Over supper, Falkland,’ he smiled. ‘You would
like
supper, would you not?’

I couldn’t say that I would not, although it would make this day the first in more years than I cared to count when I’d eaten three warm meals between dawn and midnight. I said nothing; Fairfax took my silence for acquiescence and led us to the stark hall where I’d first been received on my arrival with Warbeck. The hall had been decked out since the previous day. I do not mean to say it was like a courtly Christmas, but it was vastly different from the grim hostelries and camps below. In the middle of the room a huge dining table had been erected and on its top there were platters and bowls and flagons of wine, dark and hot. We took our seats, mine between Warbeck and the chaplain Baxter so that I faced Fairfax himself. Two waiting girls appeared with a goose, roasted to a golden brown and around it potatoes heaped high, and placed it in the middle of the table. I took the girls for camp whores dolled up for the occasion. Their skins – no doubt scrubbed in the snow – were red raw. Even so, they were the most delighted among us to be here; there were surely more opportunities for foraging and plundering from our plates than in the whole of Crediton combined. One of the girls caught my eye over the table. I was glad she would not starve tonight.

With that goose sitting right between us all, the chaplain Baxter led us in prayer. I hate to admit how it riled me to wait: the smells – the spices, the good honest grease, the idea of goose flesh dissolving in my mouth – tormented me. I felt like a mariner lost at sea: water everywhere and yet his mouth swollen with thirst. I’d not seen food like this for years. Through eyes only half closed I saw that Baxter was quoting from a pocket book very much like the one I’d found on the deserter Warbeck had shot near Taunton. I’m not a man who sits by his fireside reading pamphlets or treatises and have very rarely cared to indulge in the printed word at all, but there was something unsettling about seeing this book again.

‘“A soldier must not do wickedly”,’ Baxter quoted. His voice was light and feathery but, nevertheless, trembled with the authority of God. ‘“A soldier must be valiant for God’s cause. A soldier must not rely on his own wisdom or strength nor any provision for war. A soldier must put his confidence in God’s wisdom and strength.”’ He paused and closed the book. ‘“We who sit above the fighting man give thanks for his bravery and for this bounty.”’

It seemed an odd grace to me. We who feast tonight give thanks for those who starve. I tried not to let it bother me unduly. I
was
ravenous.

As we began, the food had me equally in paroxysms of delight and terrible convulsing cramps. I battled through and wolfed it down. As plates were piled up and then emptied again, hardly one of us spoke. They were better practised at disguising it, but all of these men were, to some degree, starving. It was hardly unexpected – I think by then that the same might have been said about the whole of England and I didn’t pause to wonder at the sense of keeping chaplains to eat up provisions that would have been better served to the soldiers. Of all of us, Baxter was the one who ate most slowly. He even took time to wipe his lips clean.

‘What is your book?’ I finally asked.

The men I was dining with conspired with a grin but Baxter’s faded first. He seemed troubled. ‘Have you not received your
Soldier’s Pocket Bible
?’ he asked.