William Falkland 01 - The Royalist (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

When the hood came off my head I kept my eyes tightly closed. Even then I could still see pillars of light that might have blinded me; but as I slowly squinted out at the world I saw they were only tall, narrow windows throwing columns of winter sunlight up the stone walls, not the fierce torches my inquisitors had once held perilously close to my face. I was in a stone chamber – but apart from the ornate windows and a candelabrum it was as bare as a cavern with only a fireplace and bookshelves to break up the walls.

I heard the footsteps of my syrupy escort patter away behind me. I turned to look but all I saw was the shape of him vanishing through an arch as a door closed behind him. My eyes slowly took a grip on their situation and adjusted to the glare from the windows. I realised the chamber was bigger than I’d first thought, and long. At the end of it a man in black robes sat behind a broad, bare desk. The light gradually faded to the edges of my vision and I saw that on one side of the desk were piles of parchment and on the other a Bible and an ink pot. The man didn’t look up and I began to wonder if he even knew I was there. He was sitting in a tall wooden chair – perhaps in other circumstances, if it had only been decorated thus, I might have called it a throne – and rhythmically lifting the pieces of parchment from one pile, signing his name at the bottom and then placing them in another. He worked with a fierce and studious concentration. Even when I jangled my chains he didn’t look up.

‘I shall be with you shortly,’ he said. He had a deep baritone voice but seemed to be sick; he spoke from the back of his throat, or through his nose. I tried to reason out my circumstances. I’d thought, when they took me from Newgate, that it was to beat information from me – information I’d gladly have given away if I’d had it. I’d not been much looking forward to that, but if they’d brought me here for such purposes then shouldn’t there be a guard? I stared at the man behind the desk. He didn’t strike me as a torturer.

Abruptly he finished signing his papers. He looked up and we met eye to eye at last. He was about my age, past his fortieth year and perhaps a touch older. He had a big hawk’s nose and matching chin; and while I have long lost my hair, his hung wild around his shoulders, though it was not as deep and lustrous as he probably thought. He wore a stiff white collar and a black coat. He had no rings on his fingers, no chain round his neck, and rather gave the impression of a scarecrow.

‘Letters of condolence, you understand,’ he said. ‘For boys we’ve lost. Their fathers deserve that.’

I wondered if there was anybody doing that on our side. It didn’t seem the sort of thing to preoccupy the King, but if there was some loyal minister sending out letters then perhaps one had already been sent for me. It had been years since I last lay with my wife or saw our children, many months since I had last had a chance to write and more than twelve since I had heard any manner of word at all; now the idea that they might have received such a letter haunted me. Perhaps they thought me dead. For my own part, and in spite of everything I’d seen, I couldn’t begin to imagine them other than as I remembered them, bright and full of life.

‘Come forward,’ the man said.

There was still a distance between me and the desk where he sat. I shuffled forward in the tiny baby steps that my shackles would allow.

‘I had thought,’ he began, ‘you would look
different
.’

My eyes flickered but I didn’t reply.

‘I had thought,’ he went on, ‘that you would cut a more
dashing
figure. Preen about your appearance a little more, like the rest of you cavaliers.’

Most of us hated it when they called us that. You could tell which of the King’s men you wanted to fight alongside by whether or not they enjoyed the name. You were best to stay away from any man who styled himself a cavalier and didn’t look on it as an insult: they were the ones who spent their time peering into a looking glass instead of training with swords or priming their muskets. I’d seen friends die because
cavaliers
weren’t watching their backs.

‘You know who I am?’

I thought by now that I did but I didn’t deign to say it.

‘Because I know who you are.’

‘Perhaps, sir, you might condescend to tell me. I seem to have lost myself these last years. I don’t know if I’ve come out of that hole the same man I went in.’

‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘How droll. I heard you were reputed for it – your sense of humour. But you’d have found precious little to laugh at if I hadn’t got word we were holding you. They’d have strung you up like every other traitor.’ He stood and came around his desk and then perched on the edge of it like a coquettish maid in a drinking room. ‘It’s over, you understand.’

‘What is?’

‘The war. By the time spring comes your King will make terms.’

‘Good.’ I could see it was possible. It was the deep of winter in 1645 and we’d been at this endless back and forth for years. In all of that time I couldn’t tell you what grounds had been won or lost or won again. It was an endless game of catch-me-if-you-can – but even children at play have better tactics for this than we did. It seemed to me sometimes that the armies were like two blind men with clubs blundering around a taproom where chance had the only say as to where and when they might meet. When they met they hit each other until one staggered away and the other couldn’t find him again. Though Parliament’s blind man had found a new and bigger club of late, and I’d heard that the King had taken a disastrous beating at Naseby. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps it really was done. For my own part I’d weep no tears whoever the victor.

‘Mr Falkland . . . William. I’ll come to the point, if I may?’

‘I was hoping you would. I have a dinner engagement.’

That at least raised his smile.

‘My name is Oliver Cromwell. Parliament has charged me with winning this conflict and that is what I intend. The King and Parliament have been at war for three years and in that time the country has been in chaos. Towns have changed hands back and forth in an ever-shifting patchwork between each side, but now we have the means to end it, to bring back peace and force the King to terms.’

He came forward and made as if he was going to hold my hands like a girl pleading with her lover. Instead he merely inspected the manacles and chain and rolled his eyes as if unsurprised. When he saw I was wearing chains around my ankles as well, he strode past me, opened the door a crack and halloed a man standing waiting in the passage. The man scuttled in and unlocked me. I felt suddenly naked. I’d been in chains since the night they rounded us up, and without them I no longer knew what to do. I found that I wanted,
needed
, their chains. If I hated them for anything in that moment, I hated them for that.

Cromwell whispered to a second man who hurried away and returned shortly carrying a plain wooden tray with slices of meat and a hunk of dry bread; then Cromwell poured us both beer. It was as sour as any I’ve tasted but I felt better all the same. The food settled less well. Moments after I took my first bite I felt my stomach in revolt. I’d eaten precious little while I was in my cell but it had been more than I was used to out on the march. Sometimes it seemed as if there was no food left in the country at all and what little there was we would rather burn than harvest.

Cromwell watched me carefully. ‘Tell me, Falkland,’ he said, ‘what is this war about?’

I opened my mouth to speak and then held my tongue. I realised I no longer knew and wondered if I ever had. I looked away. ‘God, I suppose,’ I muttered.

‘God? Presbyterians and Independents against the Catholics?’ Cromwell shook his head. ‘Catholicism has been outlawed for over a century. Our Church of England nurtures us now. It is far too late for a turning back of
that
hand. It is about how the people of England wish to be governed, no more and no less.’ He turned and faced me square. He had an odd look to him, I thought, a strange kind of almost-pride, the type I’d once had teaching my son to take his first steps. ‘What do you know about our New Model?’

So that was it. ‘Your army,’ I replied. The blind man’s new club. ‘I’ve met them once or twice.’

‘It was New Model soldiers who shattered your company.’

I didn’t doubt it. Once there were dozens of armies, local militias, and they were all stacked up against us. Then, as the last winter came to an end, came the New Model. From the rumours I’d heard since, all the Parliament soldiers were New Model now. They were fit and healthy and, more than anything else, they were
paid
. That was how Parliament made its soldiers fight.
We
were fighting for King and country, but King and country don’t fill your stomach at night or stitch you up when a sabre cuts you apart. Money does that. I had heard of prisoners choosing defection rather than torture or execution. I’d never asked myself what I would do if posed the same question but that, I supposed, was for the best. Perhaps I was about to find out.

‘I spent last winter in Oxford. After Newbury I was hurt. You might say mortally. I took musket fire to the leg and it turned gangrenous. They said I was going to die. I was at peace with that. Then I came out of it. They said it was God who spared me, to fight the good fight. But I knew different. Maggots got into the wound and ate the putrefied flesh. That’s what stopped the infections.
Our
God
–
’
I said it pointedly, for I was certain we shared the same Father – ‘did not save me, but the maggots came through.’

If Cromwell felt anything at this he didn’t let it show. I scarcely believed that men like him were interested in God. What they were really interested in was power. Even their brutes who tore around the countryside burning altars and stringing up simple folk who just wanted to pray, even
they
must have known it wasn’t done for the simple purity of our faith. When you’ve seen such acts as closely and as many times as I have, you come to understand it isn’t about religion at all; it’s about children fighting: which boy is bigger, which boy is stronger, which boy has the meatiest fists. No, for all its dressings, God had no part in this bloody war.

‘When I was fit I begged leave to go home. I hadn’t had word from my wife and children in twelve months, had not seen them in years. But they said I couldn’t go. I’d have to journey through Parliament lands to reach them and that couldn’t be risked. That’s how the King saw things – us and
them
. You see, even then you’d got what you wanted. The King was starting to give up what, by divine right, was his.’ I didn’t care much for divine right. Not then and not even six years before when I first marched north to face the Scots. The only right I knew was the opposite of wrong. But it did me a service seeing how the words caused Cromwell’s face to flicker. I’ll admit I took some joy from that.

‘The King refused me. I’d served in his armies since before this madness began but he still wouldn’t spare me. It wasn’t long before I was pressed back into service. We’d been wrestling for that pointless little town of Abingdon for so long it hardly seemed worth getting killed over, but get killed we did. Your New Model men cut us down as we ran. I thought I’d almost got away. I found myself a burned-out farmhouse to hide in. I’d been there three days when those boys turned up. I gave myself up for a mouthful of water.’

Cromwell listened to my story with a patience that belied his natural instinct. He wanted to probe and prod – I’ve heard it told that he is his army’s best inquisitor, a politician, a strategist, deftly flitting from gentry to common man – but I’d been careful not to allow him in.

‘You do yourself a disservice, of course, Falkland. You’ve left out the most intriguing parts of your own tale.’

‘Beg pardon, sir, but my tale is my own.’

‘You have chosen to omit, for instance, how you escaped our men at Newbury or how you sustained the wound that almost did for you.’

He was toying with me like a cat with a mouse. We’d get to it soon, whatever it was, this intelligence he believed I possessed. I supposed it must be something quite remarkable that he would call me here and so his disappointment not to receive whatever he sought would be equally large. I wished some giant hand would pluck me up, see I was done for and gently squeeze me until my eyes bulged and my heart stopped. Then Cromwell could play with a dead thing and I, at least, would be content.

‘You have left out too, though why I can only imagine, the very reason you’re not now dangling from a scaffold but are here instead. In the company of gentlemen.’

He said it as a jibe, for Oliver Cromwell was no more a gentleman than I. Like me, he was a man who had clawed his way into significance just as surely as his forebear had a century ago.

‘Falkland, I’ll put it to you plainly. I created the New Model to end this war and so it shall. It is a different kind of army, a constant arm of Parliament, always there, not like these rabble militias that must be hurriedly raised as the need arises. The New Model does not care where your allegiances once lay. My soldiers are paid and so they take their oaths and fight as they are told. But once again we are back to the matter at the heart of it all: how shall this be governed?’ He turned away from me and walked to one of the windows, staring out at the sunlight. For my own part, used as I was to the perpetual dark and gloom of my prison, I dared not venture too close.

‘I’ve heard stories about your . . . 
presence
in the King’s armies,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard it said that you’re a man with a conscience.’ He said the next wearily and I had the impression that this was the only time I might see a crack in the implacable Cromwell, something to let the light shine in. ‘And Falkland, I am in great need of a man with a
conscience
.’