William Falkland 01 - The Royalist (3 page)

I knew what he was referring to though I couldn’t imagine how he’d come to hear of it. But maybe it simply says something about the nature of this wretched war when a simple thing like knowing right from wrong can set you apart from other men. That, I despair to say, is what England has become.

‘Is the story true?’

I nodded.

‘You disobeyed the King and had a man put to death?’

I didn’t need to nod again. My eyes told the story. ‘It was a long time ago. He was a rapist. A butcherer.’

‘But he was one of your own. One of the King’s men. I would hear the story in your own words, Falkland.’

He was playing games again. I had the feeling I was taking part in an unfamiliar, unforgiving dance, and I was not the lead. ‘We were garrisoned in Yorkshire. Most of us went up there in 1639, the King’s army, to fight the Scots. I dare say you know better than I how that went. We were in Yorkshire for a little more than a year, licking our wounds from that before the King began his fight with Parliament, but it felt like ten. Just
waiting
. Waiting can do things to a man. Turn him into a monster. There was a woman ravished. Then another, but the second one was murdered too. Then a third, murdered again. The first woman said she didn’t properly see the man who attacked her. When it became clear to me that all three were the same villain, I asked her again. She said she wished to drop the matter. I told her that
I
did not but I understood quickly enough from her answers that she’d been paid money for her silence.’ I paused as I remembered her face. The fear in it.

‘Did that not deter you, Falkland?’

‘On the contrary, I would say it spurred me.’ I wondered now why I was telling this to Cromwell, why it seemed to matter so much to him. ‘So I continued looking. I didn’t have much else to do. A few days later I was asked to attend on the King himself. I wouldn’t say summoned, for the invitation was polite enough. But one does not decline the King. So I waited on him as was my duty. When my turn came he asked me after the disposition of my company, which I thought odd since I was not its commander. Then he spoke of the murdered women. He was, he told me, quite sure it had been some vagabond now long gone. I understood, then, that this was why he’d called me. It was to tell me to stop my prying.’

Cromwell purred. ‘And yet pry you did. You hunted and sought evidence and you saw a man put to death.’

‘I did. There were no other murders after my conversation with the King, not at first, and I thought perhaps he was right; but then I heard word of another woman from a village not far away. It was the same thing again. It seemed to me the work of the same brute.’

‘How did you find him?’

‘It wasn’t so hard. On the day before I saw the King, the butcher left his company and moved to another. I suppose he made his transfer to get away from me, but such things are hardly commonplace. When he killed again, this time where his new company was billeted, he might as well have sent me a confession note. I knew I was looking for a man who carried the King’s favour but I didn’t care. Once I knew his name, it wasn’t so hard to expose him. I saw to it that his new commander hanged him before the King heard aught about it.’

‘You did this, knowingly against the wish of your King?’ All this time Cromwell stood with his back to me, staring out of the window.

‘I suppose that’s the gist of it.’

‘And was he not displeased?’

‘If we may suppose a man is displeased when another acts against his wishes then we may suppose he was. He’d as good as told me not to pry but he didn’t come right out and tell me to stay my hand. It’s not my place to reason with King Charles nor to guess his mind.’

At last Cromwell turned towards me once more. He crossed back from the window and stood before me. For the first time he smiled, though I saw little kindness in his eyes even so. ‘Falkland, you are indeed the man I am looking for. I’ll spell it out for you why you’re here. I have a bald proposition. Help me and you might yet live. How does that sound?’

‘It sounds like something Christopher Marlowe might have written.’ I will admit to some confusion now. I’d become so beholden to the notion that I was to be questioned for some piece of intelligence I did not possess that I saw everything else as a trick. It seemed that at last we might be getting there. ‘What do you want from me?’

He ignored my question. ‘You refer me to Faust?’

‘I refer you to his sonnets.’

Cromwell did not appreciate the jest. He took me by the arm and began leading me along the length of the room. ‘The New Model,’ he said, ‘is wintering in a town named Crediton. In the spring will come the final push and this will all be over.’ We stood at the tall, ornate windows and for the first time I could see London herself. I looked out across the broad sweep of the Thames. Snow lay piled in drifts and mounds. Not a ripple moved across the water: it was frozen from bank to bank. ‘As you say, waiting can do strange things to a man, and so strange things happen to an army in the winter where all there is is the waiting. Too many men with too little to do and so men breed their own sport.’

That was how it had been in Yorkshire too, though rape and butchery were never a sport even in times of war. Of course, neither was storming a man’s church and ripping up its altar, but I wasn’t about to tell Cromwell that. We’d always been told he was the fiercest of all Puritans but, looking at him now, I fancied he was something more dangerous by far: an outsider looking in. He didn’t believe any of it. I knew more than a little about that kind of man.

‘The New Model is under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax. Though he winters with them, you will understand that however strong one man’s discipline and morality may be, he cannot be everywhere in an army’s winter camp. It has come to my attention that one of the youngest soldiers strung himself from a tree while on watch in the thick of the night. Hanged himself, to be clear. A simple suicide, you might say – some boys are not made of stern enough stuff to be soldiering at all – and, yet,’ and here Cromwell’s eyes darkened. He took me by the arm again and turned me away from the window. I was momentarily caught off guard because the pure white snow had blinded me and now the room seemed impossibly dark. ‘Several days later there was a second suicide. Then, some nights ago, a third. Each was exactly the same. Three boys strung up from the same branch of the same tree.’ Again he paused. He was fond of dramatic pauses. My jest about Marlowe had not been so far from the truth. ‘The first occurred three weeks ago. Who knows how many have hanged themselves by now? An astute man like you can, of course, see where this is leading me.’

‘To wonder why somebody wasn’t posted to watch that tree?’ I ventured.

This time Cromwell’s displeasure was clear. ‘I am giving you a chance, Falkland. I am not asking you to beg for your life. I only ask a little decorum.’

We stared at each other for a long time. Over his shoulder I could see the white havens of London stretching out. This was once a proud city. It had had a king. It’s commonfolk – and I now counted myself among them – could live their lives in the knowledge that the country had a leader, assured of a future for themselves and their children. This was a dangerous stream of thought because now it turned me to my own family. John was twelve years old when I left for the King’s service. He would call himself a man now. His sister had been barely nine but six years had passed since then. Had she already had her first suitors come to call? On the day I left, my darling Caro bade me goodbye from the end of the track but neither my son nor my daughter could bear to see me go. When I tried to imagine them as they were now, I couldn’t; or else they were all three changed beyond my recognition and when we rode and ate together, I was in the company of strangers and they beheld me as an interloper from another land.

Yet I thought about them every day. And now all it took was for me to look into Cromwell’s eyes and suddenly I saw: to the King, I was dead. To my fellow soldiers I was taken alive and strung up. I was a martyr.

But I had been reprieved.

If what Cromwell said was true – and I had no reason to doubt him here, in this palace that was built for kings in the heart of the city from which kings have always ruled – then the war would soon be over. I’d done enough. Whatever I once believed, for whatever reasons I first took up arms – and those reasons were never my own – I’d played my part. Do this thing, whatever it was, and perhaps I could have exactly what I barely dared to imagine any more: to find my family a corner of the world somewhere that no other man could touch; to grow old with them and die.

The silence had gone on too long.

‘Three men lost is one thing.’ Cromwell frowned. ‘There have been desertions too. My instinct is of something amiss. The New Model is young. Fragile, even, if you will. I would not see it fall apart.’

‘What would you have me do?’ I asked.

‘What you’ve done before, Falkland. The New Model is nothing without discipline. See this thing finished before it starts. I require a man of conscience who stands outside the New Model and is not a part of it, to whom those whose sympathies are uncertain might turn. If suicides they are, tell me why. If something else . . . Tell me if I should be concerned.’

‘I’ll need provisions,’ I said.

Cromwell had closed his hands. In another man I might have seen the gesture as the clutching and kneading of a rosary. ‘You will be well provisioned.’

With those words I was dismissed. I turned on my heel – it was still a novelty to move so freely and I felt I might fall – and I saw that the man with the syrupy voice had reappeared in the doorway, beckoning me closer. He was shorter than I’d thought, thin and wiry with a mean, pinched face and narrow eyes that darted all about between their glares. Before I reached him Cromwell called out.

‘One more thing, Falkland.’

I raised an eyebrow and waited.

‘Remember who came for you in your hour of need,’ he said. I thought he was being deliberately cryptic, as men who love the bluff and counter-bluff of politics often are. ‘You will, no doubt, hear murmurs in the New Model, both for me and against me. But when foul words are whispered, Falkland, remember where your loyalties lie. The King is beaten either way. The New Model will bring him more quickly to terms and end this madness. Think on that.’

Out in the corridor I had chance to pause while the man with the syrupy voice walked on. Cromwell spoke of loyalties as if he knew me. I smiled at that, the first true smile since they saved me from the scaffold. Oliver Cromwell, I had no doubt, was a man who knew a great deal about trading in loyalties. A man does not fall and rise again so spectacularly as he had done without knowing the politics of people. And yet – and here was the cause of my smile – he’d made a terrible error. You can only buy a man’s loyalty when he has a loyalty to sell, and I had none. I was not the King’s man. I’d promised myself that long ago, that I was not truly in the service of any man at all. Nor was I in the service of God – who, though He has always been there, has never once stooped so low as to lend me His hand.

No. What Cromwell could not know was that I was in the service of only one man. His name was William James Falkland. He had a wife and two beautiful children whose lives he was missing and somehow, come hell or high water, come roundhead or cavalier, he was going to piece his family back together.

My escort paused, waiting for me to catch up. ‘Don’t fret, Falkland.’ He sounded weary. ‘I’ll be there to keep a watch over you, there and back again. Have no fear on that account.’

CHAPTER 3

My escort who had brought me from Newgate now led me to where I was to be billeted for the night, above one of the old Inns of Court where Cromwell had once studied.

‘Cromwell thinks you’re something special, Falkland, but I don’t. Make sure your feet still fit in your boots come the morning.’ He gave me a curious look then. ‘Still, it’s no small thing to disobey your King. Were you not afraid?’

I answered him truthfully that no, I hadn’t been, that I hadn’t given it a thought. I couldn’t have told him why, had he asked, only that I did what was right to be done. I might have said something about how a man who follows what he knows to be right walks without fear, thinking perhaps that any man who was a part of Cromwell’s coterie might understand that; might understand that even kings can be wrong. Afterwards, after I was done and saw the brute swinging dead, then I’d had my doubts. But not before. ‘If we’re to be companions on the road, sir, might I know your name?’

He hesitated only a moment. ‘Warbeck,’ he said. ‘Henry Warbeck, and I’m no sir or lord. We’ll see, Falkland, whether or not you’re afraid of Black Tom. A King’s man poking around his army? He’ll not like you for that, not one bit, and nor that Cromwell sent you neither.’ He eyed me closely. ‘A King’s man might like nothing more than to spread a little discord in our New Model. It won’t make a bit of difference. The King’s done for.’

He spat the words out in disgust, a sentiment heightened by his rotten breath. Perhaps he meant it as provocation but if so then he sorely missed his mark. ‘Good riddance to this war then,’ I answered; and then: ‘Cromwell and Fairfax? Do they not trust one another?’ From our side it had always seemed they were as thick as thieves.

Warbeck glared. For a moment I thought he might raise his fists and after four months in the cells I wasn’t sure I could best him. But he slowly mastered himself. ‘I would say they do, Falkland,’ he said at last. ‘As much as any two great men in these times. When this is done they will rule England between them and we’ll all be better for it. But the New Model is . . .’ He hesitated, searching for the right word, I thought. ‘It’s
precious
to Cromwell.’ He backed away and as he parted I was left in no doubt of my place. The key turned in the lock behind me. Out of my cell or not, I was still a prisoner.

My room was a small chamber with a single bedstead – a menial little room, but it felt a palace after that cell in Newgate. A candle stub guttered on the ledge and the window was so thick with ice that I could hardly look out, but no matter – it
had
these things. For the first time since the summer I might wake in the morning and see daylight. I stood at my window and stared as a man parched might stare at the sea. Through the frost I saw the green grass and skeletal trees of Gray’s Inn. A man in long black robes marched purposefully with a small white dog trotting behind and I had a sudden surge of feeling. Prince Rupert, in whose lines I had oftentimes fought, had had a dog just the same until Cromwell and his men had butchered it on Marston Moor. The dog was called Boy and, until that day, seemed impervious to shots. The roundheads had named it a familiar, called it a kind of popery, a kind of witchcraft. I suppose they thought the tide had turned the day they cut that poor dog down.

Beside the bedstead was a simple wooden chair and, draped over it, a murrey gown, breeches and a stiff woollen shirt with a tall, broad collar. Perched on top sat a black hat with a wide brim and steepled crown. There were boots as well – not new but better than the sacking bound around my feet. I supposed I should have been grateful. When I bent down I saw on the floor a bowl of water and rags. I disrobed and slowly and gently lifted away the dirt. Four months of it, and when I was done I was beginning to feel like a man again. I glanced at my feet and decided not to look too closely in order to preserve that feeling. They were falling apart in a way a soldier should never allow and I wasn’t ready to witness it yet.

I put on the shirt, the breeches, the murrey gown, the wide-brimmed hat. The rippled reflection of myself in the window glass, I decided, didn’t really look like one of the King’s traitors, one of Parliament’s own. If I ever found them again then my own men would take me for what I was. I wondered if the same could be said for my family. I thought about them then, tried to picture them as I often had back in my cell; but now, at last, I allowed myself that luxury, that joy that I might yet see them again. I’m not ashamed that I wept. Nor that I cannot say for how long. I had held them away from myself, as far as I could, for so long.

Caro and I were joined in July 1625. It was a swift romance and, if the story is to be told, then I must say it was Caro who did the romancing. She had, she told me later, set her eyes on me from the very first. Her father was a local lord, a man whose faith in the King was only outmatched by his faith in God, and if he was ever dismayed that his firstborn daughter fell for me, a lowly tenant farmer, he was graceful enough not to show it. He took me hunting and told me of his daughter’s intent. I did not agree immediately though it was always imagined that I would not refuse. The marriage contract was not only for a wife but for lands and titles. A position. When I shook the old man’s hand I knew my life was changing forever.

I was a young man then and had not before considered myself the marrying type. I worked the farm and had no great desire to go beyond it. Yet Caroline Miller claimed she saw something in me that she found lacking in the nearby men of her own standing. Later she would tell me she’d seen me in church and watched me working the land. She took me for a native Cornishman but really I was an interloper, sent here by my father before he died. Caro’s own father had had bigger things planned for her – alliances, he confided in me, that might see his family rising higher in political circles, something that might even bring a grandson one day to the King’s court – but Caro was her father’s little girl and, no matter how he protested, she knew she would get what she wanted. To this day I don’t know why it was she wanted me. I’m certain it wasn’t rebellion; for Caro, no matter how obstinate, was never one for frippery and nonsense. If there was an explanation other than love then I never knew it. Nor, in truth, did I want to find it out.

If I’d never seen myself being a husband then I’d surely never seen myself a father. As fate would have it we were married three years before we were blessed with our first child. By then Caro feared she was barren – and I dare say her father feared I was as impotent as Essex, that commander of Parliament we were one day bound to meet in battle – but, at last, we were given a son. We named him John after a brother Caro had lost. Three years later there came a daughter. We named her Charlotte; and if that was to be my life then I was happy.

Nor had I ever thought to find myself in London, not a whit of intent to accompany Caro’s father into this seditious world of kings and parliaments. But the things you do for love are many and oftentimes unexpected. Caro earnestly desired that I stand alongside her father. So when her father came to London in service of the King, I was at his side. And when the King marshalled an army to go north in the winter of 1639 to meet the treasonous Scots, I too was part of that army. For her. For love.

In that room looking out over the frozen Thames, six years later, when the tears would not go away, I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes, willing sleep to come and rescue me for a few brief hours. How I wished I’d stayed on the farm and not become part of this wretched war.

Warbeck returned in the morning and took me to a kitchen on the other side of the Inns. England was starving but it seemed London was not. It was, though, bitterly cold and they were burning wood in the range. I noticed trees being felled in the courts and a small part of me took pleasure in that. It meant, against all their proud declarations, that Cromwell and his crowd had not returned coal to their capital. Newcastle was still with the King or else under the fist of the dreaded Scots.

Warbeck fed me a breakfast of pottage and cider and we were on our way, yet it seemed to me that our carriage took us further into the city and not away towards the West Country. My suspicion was proved well founded when we stopped and Warbeck snarled at me to get out. We were close to a wooden bridge over a small river that I thought must be the Fleet. The street ran close beside it and an inn stood nearby, though Warbeck paid it no attention. A little way further the cobbles were bridged by a stone arch whose purpose seemed obscure. Warbeck pointed and I saw his meaning. At the far end of the street stood a scaffold and gallows and the sight of them conjured a dagger of fear that struck hard and deep. Yesterday I’d come from my cell ready to die. But much had happened. I’d allowed myself to have hope again.

‘Take a good long look, Falkland,’ hissed Warbeck. ‘Keep this sight in your mind. Stray a foot out of place and that’s what awaits you.’

‘It appears the same as what awaited me yesterday,’ I said with a lightness I certainly didn’t feel. Warbeck had made his point well.

‘Two men from this very street were found to be plotting against Parliament. They were hanged from those gallows. We find use for them often enough.’ I knew it must be true: the gallows were quiet now but surely saw frequent service, otherwise they would have been disassembled and the guardsmen who stood watch to keep them from being pilfered for firewood assigned to other duties. Warbeck turned a cold look on me and then slowly shifted his eyes to the street under my feet. ‘Fifty years ago, recusant papists were hanged and quartered on this spot.’

If we were to be given a tour of every part of London in which murder had been dealt to those Parliament con-sidered stood against it then I doubted we’d ever reach our destination. I felt a strong desire to change the subject away from hangings; and what interested me far more was why Cromwell would employ a royalist plucked from a Newgate cell to spy on his own ally Fairfax. Perhaps his intent was honest, but as a spy was certainly how I’d be seen. ‘Have you ever met Fairfax?’ I asked.

Warbeck favoured me with a thin smile. ‘Get in the carriage, Falkland. We have ground to cover.’

The carriage took us out of the barren city and I had the chance to see, first hand, the excavations and fortifications we’d heard about winters before when I was billeted in Oxford with a splint upon my leg. I’ll not say they were impressive things but they were better than nothing. The commonfolk had turned out to dig ditches and build tall earthen walls, and while they wouldn’t keep Prince Rupert and the King out if they ever gathered a strong enough army, they would certainly hold back any that tried to pass in the face of an organised defence. In the waxing and waning of powers, the King had never come close enough to London for those earthworks to earn their keep. If Cromwell was right then they never would. All the effort of their creation would become wasted, as this war had wasted so many.

Shortly after we passed some common land where a vast bonfire had been piled high. It frustrated me to see, because I’d spent more than my fair share of nights freezing in army camps, huddled up with my horse for warmth, and I knew that Londoners would freeze in their houses this winter. The river was already covered in ice right across and this fuel would be better used warming their homes. It was only when we came close that I understood: there was no cheap Guy Fawkes on the pyre. There was a crude effigy of the Pope.

I asked Warbeck for the date. He gave me a look that said it was none of my concern but at last he muttered, ‘The fifth, Falkland. The fifth of November.’

So tonight they’d watch the Pope burn and cheer as he went up in smoke. There was once a time when the idea would have wounded me deeply, and though that time had passed many years ago, groping through a sea of blood and earth in some Yorkshire field, for some reason I still cringed from the image. I cringed too at the thought that a month from now those cheering, dancing men would be dying from the cold.

‘Does it injure you, Falkland, to see what Englishmen really think of your church?’

‘It’s not my quarrel.’

I meant for him to understand that I was referring him to God but he must have been simpler than I thought. ‘Your quarrel?’ he gasped. ‘Isn’t that what you’re fighting for?’

I gawped at him. ‘You think we take the King’s banner because the Queen is a Catholic or some nonsense like that? You think we fight because we wish to reunite our church with that of Rome?’ Perhaps some men did, but none that I’d seen, and in truth Cromwell had the right of it – that idea had been dead and buried long before I’d been born. Most of us were fighting because there was no way out, not for King or country or God – notions of God, I had supposed, were reserved for those who fought for Parliament. Cromwell had said otherwise. For my own part, I had long lost any idea of what any of us were fighting for. In the early days, I knew, much of England had tried simply to keep out of it, hiring bands of clubmen to try and hold the armies of both sides at bay, but it hadn’t done them any good. The war was a kind of collective mania and it touched us all. It’s hard to explain to the true believers. I’d tried before and never found much joy, and I supposed Warbeck would be the same. ‘How long will we be on the road?’ I asked.

‘Seven nights. Perhaps more, perhaps less. It will depend on what we find.’ He reached beneath the carriage seat, produced a bundle and handed it to me. I didn’t have to unwrap it to know that within it was a musket. Being a cavalryman I wasn’t used to the weapon, so I made to hand it back.

‘No.’ He pressed the musket into my hands. ‘You must carry it until we reach the camp. The roads are not safe.’ He had more under his seat, I saw. Three or four at least, wrapped to keep them dry. He didn’t offer me any powder. I was to bluff, then? And yet it pleased a small part of me – despite myself – to know that, even this close to London, bands of the King’s men perhaps travelled the roads. I hoped we didn’t find them. I’d sooner have died at the hands of an enemy than a friend.