by S. J. Deas
‘You have more than enough room after your family’s desertion,’ Fairfax began, ‘and your other guests can now be gone. This man is here at Master Cromwell’s bidding to look into the matter of the suicide tree. I beg you look after him.’ He nodded at Warbeck. ‘Warbeck here will see to emptying your house for you.’
Miss Cain blinked in surprise and looked me up and down anew. She was afraid but she was hiding it better now. I opened my hands and tried to show her I meant her no harm. ‘An intelligencer?’ she asked. I was fairly certain it was a London accent.
‘Of that ilk.’ I peered back at her. Her fear had changed on hearing that. Now I was little more than a nuisance, whereas before . . . before she had taken me for something else.
Fairfax stepped aside. He returned to his horse and looked down at me.
‘Falkland, Warbeck, Miss Cain will see your horse and mule stabled at the livery at the inn. There are none of the Model’s horses there so they’ll be quite safe. In the morning I’ll send a man to show you to the . . .’ Here he paused. ‘. . . the place those boys chose for their end. Master Falkland, Warbeck, I bid you goodnight.’
With that he was gone.
The snow started to fall again, big flakes that would smother the camp in another foot of white. Miss Cain only looked at me, frowning. Eventually she stepped back and indicated stiffly that I should enter. I waited in the hallway while she took care of my horse. Warbeck moved on into the house. I heard him rousing men from their cots, poking and kicking at them to gather their things and get out. I wondered where they would go with the sun already set and snow falling from the sky, but Warbeck seemed unconcerned. By the time Miss Cain returned from the stables the other men were mostly gone. The last two had taken it upon themselves to protest at such a sudden eviction. It was a small pleasure listening to Warbeck snarl.
Miss Cain’s teeth were chattering when she came inside. I made my apologies but she appeared disinclined to listen, bustling me brusquely out of the hallway and into her front room, where there was a table and chair as well as a cot. There was a hearth but no fire was burning tonight: nor, I guessed, had one burned in the past several months, for it was warmer inside than out but not by much. I could see the litter on the floor where other soldiers had bunked here in recent days. Miss Cain returned shortly with mulled wine spiced with cinnamon and the room suddenly and unexpectedly smelled of the childhood Christmases I’d always cherished. I felt my spirits lift. It didn’t matter a bit to me that I was in the heart of a camp that would have eradicated Christmas forever. I would take my pleasures where and when I could.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Falkland,’ she began. ‘I do not mean to appear rude.’
‘And I do not mean to intrude, Miss Cain.’
‘Nor do you. At least, no more than we have already been intruded upon by your army.’ She looked around her. ‘I suppose you and your man are a blessing. At least there’s only two of you.’
‘Miss Cain, you mistake me. This is not my army. I am . . . I am not a soldier.’
This she scoffed at. ‘Intelligence is just another sort of soldiering. My father taught me you could wage war with ideas every bit as well as you could wage war with cannons.’
‘Your father taught you well,’ I said. ‘This is a war of ideas as much as it’s a war of armies. But I’m not with the New Model, Miss Cain. I’m not here of my own accord.’
Once she understood this she seemed to soften. She took a sip of her drink. ‘A prisoner?’
‘Until recently. But I imagine no more a prisoner than you.’
‘And your man?’ Warbeck was still shouting at the two soldiers in the upstairs room.
‘Is not my man,’ I told her, although I thought she’d already guessed. She didn’t reply but rather shuffled her feet and left to get more wine. While she was gone I paced the edge of the room. There was little to look at but I had the feeling that this was a family home, that Miss Cain was not one of the camp followers I’d taken her to be. I recalled what Fairfax had said – that her family were deserters – but I couldn’t fathom what it meant, if this truly was her home.
From the top of the stairs came a scuffle. A moment after it ended I watched Warbeck march the last two pikemen out of the house at sabre-point. They left but not without a deal of oaths and cursing. Miss Cain looked weary. ‘I can’t offer much,’ she said. ‘But I can offer you some hospitality. Black Tom has all his favourites here when they come. A place they can have a proper bed and not some tent in the fields.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Crediton has become like a city of tents for the winter.’
‘I never liked the city.’
‘I’d thought to see some more of it tonight, Miss Cain, to begin my work. I’m eager to have it finished and be gone.’
Beside me Warbeck sighed and rolled his eyes but Miss Cain chose to ignore him. ‘Is it . . .’ She handed me more wine but I didn’t drink. It was already touching me and I didn’t want to sleep, not yet. ‘Is it those boys, Mr Falkland?’
It surprised me that she knew about them. I judged the New Model to be ten thousand strong, perhaps more, and though rumours spread through bored soldiers like the pox, as Fairfax had put it, it didn’t seem to me that the loss of a few men should stir such stories. I asked her what she’d heard.
‘Only that . . .’ She gulped at her wine. ‘They were sweet boys, Mr Falkland. Young boys. I had a brother their age. It’s not right that boys like them should be fighting. They do not choose it, do they, Mr Falkland?’
I certainly had not. I shook my head.
‘Would you see where they were hanged?’ she ventured.
‘I’d wanted to see it from the start but Black Tom,’ I said with an emphasis that took her into my confidence, ‘would have me wait until the morning.’ I could feel Warbeck’s glare on my back. I’d learned the sense of it these last few days. ‘Still, I suppose it doesn’t matter. It’s already been several weeks.’
Miss Cain furrowed her eyes and took the cup away from her lips. In the gloom her green eyes glimmered.
‘Mr Falkland,’ she said, ‘it has indeed been several weeks since the first boy was discovered. But you’re mistaken! A fourth boy died at that tree only three nights ago.’
I was still. ‘A fourth?’
She nodded, trying to suppress a shiver.
‘I was on the road,’ I said. ‘The same as the last?’
Here she took a deep breath and straightened her cloak. ‘Oh no, Mr Falkland. Not the same at all. This boy . . . This boy blew himself to pieces with a granadoe.’
CHAPTER 7
When I was a soldier I was, for a time, a dragoon. Some of the men I rode with thought we were better than the King’s pikemen, better even than his horse, because we were the men sent out as sharp and swiftly as a crossbow bolt between the eyes. If we got word of some threat, or if we needed to launch an attack lightning fast, we’d saddle up and gallop out, dismounting to take up positions with muskets and sabres. Myself, I was never of the opinion that we were better than the rest. To me, we dragoons were simply jacks of all trades and masters of none. I would rather have held a pike, vicious, unwieldy weapons that they are. At least there is honesty in a pike.
It didn’t suit me well to be back in an army camp. I had, I supposed, grown used to my prison cell. More than that, I’d grown used to the idea that I was never going to see the light of day again. If Cromwell hadn’t come for me then I would have been on the gallows by now and all of this would have been over. Even in the comfort of Miss Cain’s home, a part of me wished it had gone the other way. As we went out, leaving the fractious Warbeck behind us, as I breathed in the smells – for there were horrible smells clinging like fog, even around the snowy streets of Crediton – I could remember exactly how it had been, my first winter in Yorkshire waiting for the wild Scots to appear across the moors. I did not much like the fear it struck in me, for as Miss Cain and I went into the night, I felt as small as a child crying in his cot to be cuddled by
his mother. I’m ashamed to say that I’d cried that way once, a thirty-nine-year-old man with his mother already twenty years in the grave.
The snow had stopped again and the sky was partly clear, the air as sharp as cut glass. There must have been a bell tower in the church because I heard it ring for a change of watch. Ten bells. Later than I’d thought. As a soldier I’d hated the midnight watch. I was never a superstitious man – not even when I still believed in God – but it was during this watch that people believed foul creatures were abroad, the witching hour when diabolical things might happen. I wondered if it had been the midnight watch when those boys took their lives.
Miss Cain and I came on foot past the hanged man and across the northern end of Crediton. Where the streets petered out, another city of tents and wooden shelters rose up. Two watchmen sat on upturned buckets, huddled and rubbing their hands around a small fire. They barely glanced at us as we passed and made no attempt to offer a challenge. I wondered if they knew Miss Cain by sight; although wrapped as we were with our cloaks pulled tight around us I wondered how they might know us at all.
Main Street broadened and then disappeared. The snow at this end of the town was thicker and I felt the bite of the wind. We walked along trails that the soldiers themselves had carved and rolled. It was a thing of monstrous industry, this New Model Army. The bands I’d fought in were of a hundred men, but here the companies must have been a thousand strong and more. The New Model, it seemed, was less an army than it was a city that could move. Even under the blankets of snow I could see the way the tents had been erected as if according to a map of streets. Fires were built at exact intervals between them. A thin trail led to the latrines. Here and there men paced up and down, warding off the chill as they kept watch.
A thought occurred to me. I remembered the man hanging from the chestnut tree. ‘Miss Cain, how many women are left in Crediton?’
Her eyes flashed in the darkness. ‘You mean whores.’
‘No, I do not.’
Miss Cain trudged on through the snow in silence. The further we went the less ordered the camp became, as if even the strict whips of Cromwell and Fairfax could only reach so far. The tents were no longer laid out according to a pattern but grew up haphazardly, a little like weeds sneaking in to take over a perfectly laid bed of flowers. They were sparser too and I fancied that some of the soldiers had struck out here to be as far from the drills and discipline of their commanders as they could. In one field I saw, quite distinct from the rest, a circle of tents standing in the shelter of a ruined barn. An enormous fire had been stoked underneath the stone and still burned bright even in spite of the snow. Although here and there men paced back and forth casting an illusion of watchfulness, we were not challenged once nor, I dare say, even noticed. I wondered what Fairfax would say to that if he knew; but then, what threat could there be to such a vast encampment as this? If I was to believe Warbeck then the King’s men were done for in this part of England, reduced to a few roving bands and skeletal garrisons that would doubtless melt away at the first whisper of the New Model on the march.
‘As soon as we knew they were coming, a lot of us left,’ said Miss Cain at last. ‘If you had relations in Exeter, that’s where you went. My neighbours went to a farm in Dorset, though it was a perilous journey. I heard some tried to get to London.’
‘Straight into Parliament’s hands?’
‘The people here don’t care for Parliaments or Kings, Mr Falkland. They just want to see the spring.’
‘Yet, Miss Cain, you stayed.’
‘Would that we had not. I begged and I begged but my father was a stubborn fool. He wouldn’t leave the town he’s known all his life. Until . . .’
She fell silent and stopped. I told her she didn’t have to go on but she shook her head.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’d have you hear it, what monsters you’re bound to. When the army moved in, they took every spare room they could find. If they didn’t drive people straight from their homes, it was only to displace them by fouler means. When my father and brother would not give up their own shelter for housing soldiers, they had a cruel trick. They pressed them into serving for the New Model and gave them such a lowly rank that they would have to sleep wild in the fields, worse than cattle.’
I remembered how slyly Fairfax had spoken to her. ‘That was why they deserted.’
‘Yes,’ she said. Her voice trembled not with fear or cold but with an anger hungry for revenge. ‘But never has the word been used with less just cause.’
We reached the very edge of the encampment where the frozen river ran. All around us was stark white and black with nothing in between. All the same, I knew there would be men out there, keeping watch along every trail and track leading from the town. I looked around and tried to see the lie of the land, looking for the points I’d have chosen if this monster was my own to command. I could hardly see a hillside, only the endless rolling white.
Some way out from the centre of Crediton, an acre from the bank of the river, stood an old oak like a giant taloned hand clawing out of the white earth. Its branches were topped with a crown of ice but against the white hills it stood out like a burn. On one side there was an entangled mess of branches large and small. On the other, only a single bough protruded, nearly as thick as the trunk itself. Miss Cain pointed to it. ‘There.’
‘You do not have to approach,’ I said, thinking her superstitious.
‘You’d leave me here?’
I looked around at the desolate cold and the scattered camp full of soldiers. ‘You have a fair argument.’
We stepped off the trail and at once the snow reached above our boots. We crossed the field and plunged in drifts as high as our knees. I went first so as to blaze a path for Miss Cain to follow. In this way it took us half an hour to cross an acre of ground. The exertion, at least, kept the cold at bay. A hundred yards short of the oak we stopped and the tree seemed as tall as the distance between us. It was a true colossus.
The single bough drew my eye. It was perhaps fifteen feet off the ground, well over twice my height, and the end of a rope still hung from halfway along. These, I decided, had been brave boys. I’d known men take a dagger to their wrists or drink a sleeping draught laced with nightshade, but those were things that could be done in the blink of an eye. These boys had first had to scale the tree – no mean feat in itself, for the first hand-hold was not until two feet above my head – and then crawl out along that branch and tie a rope around their necks before they made the long, lonesome jump.
As we drew close, the snow underfoot grew shallower, much of it caught in the branches above. I circled the tree, though I couldn’t say what it was I hoped to find. Miss Cain followed three paces behind. The night was bitter now and she wrapped her arms around herself.
‘You’ll catch your death,’ I said.
‘Your jests are in the poorest taste, Master Falkland.’
I’d secretly known all along that I’d find nothing of note. The snow had fallen so deep that I might have been walking on fresh graves and I wouldn’t have known it. Still, something compelled me. I wanted to get a closer look. ‘Miss Cain,’ I said, ‘you would do well to stand back.’
I was fortunate that the snow had piled drifts against the trunk. Once compacted underfoot it made for a good stool and, in that way, I was able to reach the first hand-hold in the bark and haul myself onto the lowest branch on the side opposite the one from which the boys had jumped. Miss Cain cried out a warning but I told her to be calm and keep talking; I wanted the comfort of her voice calling out to me in the dark. I didn’t like to admit it but I knew, suddenly, that I was not a young man any more. A cramp seized my leg and told me I should retreat but I refused to listen. It was an ungainly scramble, one I was glad nobody else could see, but I climbed higher and shimmied around the trunk to reach the hanging branch. With my legs wrapped around the ice cold bough I inched my way out to the rope. I reeled it in. The end was frayed where the last boy
had been cut down. There were no ropes for the two boys before that, so they must have been brought in. Somebody was getting lazy.
I took out my dagger and began to cut, but the rope was frozen solid and I might as well have been trying to drive a darning needle through plate armour. From atop the branch I could see for miles. Crediton was just a little town with an implausible number of fires dotted around. Perhaps Miss Cain’s cinnamon-spiced wine still lingered in my memory for I found myself thinking of Christmas once more – if there was ever to be a Christmas again. I imagined Crediton would be a peaceful place to spend it once the army was gone.
I didn’t have the heart to scramble back through the branches so I lowered myself to hang under the branch, clinging to the rope. In that way I had a terrible flash of the boys’ last moments. Only when I let go, I did not dangle but dropped and rolled in the snow. It was further than it seemed and I landed hard; it knocked the wind out of me and I suppose I was lucky not to do myself an injury. When I didn’t immediately rise, Miss Cain rushed over.
‘It was further than I reckoned,’ I gasped, staggering to my feet with the help of her hand and struggling for breath. My back was jarred but nothing more; nevertheless I made a solemn vow that in future I would act my age.
‘I tried to tell you, sir. It’s because of the granadoe.’
I stood back and scrutinised the land with eyes half squinting. It was difficult to tell because of the way the snow had fallen but Miss Cain was correct: there was a depression in the earth. I kicked away some of the snow and could even see where portions of the tree’s roots, as thick and gnarled as the branches, had been exposed at the bottom of a shallow crater. Here was where the fourth boy had met his end, right underneath that rope. A granadoe is a terrible thing. I’d seen them deployed on several occasions. They were little more than balls of gunpowder, tightly compacted and encased in a shell of pottery. There wasn’t a single soldier I’d known who didn’t fear them. More often than not the things would ignite before they could be bowled at the enemy. Half of the crippled beggars haunting London’s streets had once been soldiers using these new weapons of war.
