by S. J. Deas
I reached out and touched the iron plate. When I drew my finger away, it was black with ink. I felt Kate, the presence of her close behind my shoulder. ‘What is it?’ she whispered.
There came a sound as of footsteps on the floorboards above. I hooded the lantern and eased myself to the window, then lifted a latch to peer between the shutters. The guard was standing where I’d seen him before, bored and cold and shuffling his feet, untroubled. The noise didn’t come again. The world outside was still. The wind, perhaps. Or a bird on the rooftop, or rats.
Satisfied that we were alone, I re-latched the shutter and turned back to the contraption. I dropped to my knees and peered around it with the lantern. Crates lay piled underneath and around it. I hauled one of the boxes into the middle of the room, careful not to let it drag. It wasn’t sealed and when I unmasked our light and shone it inside, I saw stacked a dozen copies of The Soldier’s Pocket Bible. I lifted a copy and opened the cover to read the verses inside but there were no words at all. I flicked through the first pages and still there was nothing. I dropped the book and picked up another. This one too was blank.
Again I heard a footstep and this time there was no doubt of it. One, two, three, four. I froze and felt Kate quivering beside me. I fancied I could almost hear the race of her heart. I turned very slowly so her face was inches from my own and then leaned closer still until my lips brushed her ear. ‘Go,’ I whispered, almost soundless. ‘Go back outside. Go home.’
I sensed her hesitation.
‘It’s one thing if they catch me here. If they catch you then it’s another.’ As she started to move I caught her for a moment and touched a finger to her cheek. I meant to thank her but my words somehow lost themselves and so I withdrew and watched her go while I stayed frozen still and listened. The footsteps above had stopped again and I didn’t hear Kate as she crept away. Everything fell to silence. I knew I should follow as soon as I thought she must be gone but a curiosity held me fast. I peered underneath the contraption and looked into the next crate. There, as I’d expected, I saw hundreds of tiny scraps of metal. When I reached in, I found my hands full of letters and apostrophes, of full stops and quotation marks. I let them slide through my fingers back into the box and stood, my hands sticky with the residue of ink. The contraption before me was a printing press. I’d not seen one before, though perhaps that was ignorance on my part; it sometimes seemed that there were as many printing presses in London as scholarly young men. Yet the question presented itself: what was a printing press doing in Crediton, far away from the frenetic push and pull of scholarly debate?
I heard the footsteps again and hooded the lantern at once. They seemed to be getting louder this time and came at irregular intervals, as if of a man dragging himself along and having to stop to tend to an injured leg, or hauling himself along on a railing.
The staircase. Someone was upstairs and now they were coming down. I’d hesitated too long. The only way out was through the hall and that meant I would surely be seen. There was the window but that was scarcely big enough for me to squeeze through and the guard would certainly hear. I cowered back into the corner in the deepest shadows I could find. My eyes were drawn back to the crate of pocket Bibles underneath the printing press. It hardly seemed possible that they should be printed here but I’d already seen the way this New Model worked, the frightening efficiency with which it operated: men little more than commodities to be tallied up on a warmonger’s ledger. I reached into the box and lifted a book, dropping it into my pocket. The book was bound. Why bind a book before its pages were printed?
The footsteps stopped. I retreated deeper into shadow, crouched in the corner of the room where the lip of the printing press might hide me, and fixed my gaze on the door, waiting for it to open. I braced myself. As soon as I saw the shape of any shadow enter the room, I’d run them down, push them aside and make off the way I’d come, as quick as I could. In the dark, no one could possibly see my face. Fairfax might guess who the intruder to his press had been but he couldn’t be sure. It was a relief to know that Kate, at least, was safe.
No one came. I seemed to have been squatting there an interminable time when I heard the cottage door open. Whoever had come down the stairs wasn’t coming to the press but was leaving altogether. I eased across the room to the windows, cracked open a shutter and looked out. A hunched figure stopped for a moment to exchange a word with the guard then moved slowly on, heading back to the town while the guard turned smartly and hurried for the door. The hunched figure had heard us then. I ran into the hall and through the scullery as fast as I could, all thought of stealth abandoned. I heard the front door open as I bolted through the back and outside. Miss Cain, I saw at once, had not heeded my advice and gone home but was waiting for me behind the wall – I took her hand and pulled her away as fast as I dared. I hissed at her, ‘Quickly! Hide!’
Behind us I heard the guard rush out into the yard as we rounded a corner and dived together into the shadows of a low wall. The night was dark enough and the shadows deep enough that even if he came looking I thought we might hide here and not be seen for as long as we were quiet and still. I strained my ears but he didn’t follow. After a few long moments I thought I heard the closing of a door and the click of a latch.
‘What was it?’ Kate asked. ‘What are they keeping in there?’
‘A printing press. They make those pocket Bibles here.’ I took her in my arms and this time held her tight a moment. ‘Thank you, Kate. Thank you. Now go home. I have another matter to attend to.’
She clung to my arm as if reluctant to let me go. ‘Master Falkland, I have . . .’
I pulled away. Whoever had been in that house with us, I very much wanted to speak with them and I’d already put Miss Cain in enough danger. I left her there in the night and hurried away.
CHAPTER 18
I returned as quickly as I could, running back across the field and through a different alley, leaving Kate in my wake. When I reached the road I stopped. Looking back towards the cottage it emptied into the sprawling encampment, but I could see no figure wending its way through the tents and lean-tos. In the other direction, towards the church and the heart of Crediton, three figures shuffled away. The closest appeared to be hunched and so I took that to be the man from the cottage; but as I came closer I saw it was a woman wrapped in a shawl, waddling away like a fattened duck. Beyond her stood a soldier in a slovenly red coat, flicking a stone up and down, his eyes flitting manically over the lane, while further on another man in a long black coat hurried past the church, throwing looks over his shoulder. At times he broke from a hurried walk to a canter, then slowed again. I left the woman and took after him, careful that I shouldn’t let him know he was being followed, but perhaps I came at him too swiftly, for only halfway from the church to the square he risked a glance over his shoulder, fixed me with a look and broke into a run, darting along the narrow lane that ran beside the graveyard. I gave chase at once; when I turned the corner I saw that the end of the lane was blocked by a low wall of ice and a soldiers’ camp that sat behind it. The man fleeing ahead of me vaulted over the wall, kicking the camp apart as he thundered through. Three men were gathered around a fire in the shelter of a timber frame over which ice had grown and snow had settled to form a deep roof – as the man ran past, he tumbled the ring of stones that walled in their fire and unsettled the snow on their shelter, dousing it. The soldiers jumped at once to their feet and hurled oaths and curses; distracted, I slipped on the ice and sprawled headlong. When I rose again, the running man was gone. I raced to the wall and stared past the three men at the sprawling encampment ahead. I could see a dozen different figures now, silhouettes in the night against the camp fires, but all of them too far away to be my man.
‘Which way?’ I demanded.
‘Who are you?’ one of the soldiers returned, reaching for a blade.
‘The man who came this way! Ah to Hell,’ I cursed, ‘I don’t have the time . . .’ I vaulted t
he low wall of ice just as the runaway had done but I was evidently not as sprightly as him for I caught my boot on the lip and went tumbling forward. All that stopped me from falling over was a stone wall that reared up and smashed me in the face. I flailed through the soldiers, too desperate to pay much mind to the blood that trickled from my nose, and stumbled on into the wild sea of the encampment before me; but my ship had already set sail. The man was gone.
Disconsolate, I took the oaths of the soldiers camped around me and added a few of my own. I carefully levered myself back over their icy wall and trod back along the lane beside the graveyard. The road in front of the church was as empty as I’d last seen it, with only the old woman still shuffling towards me, hunched under her shawl; but when I came to stand in front of her, she reeled back as if I’d lifted my hand to drive it into her face. I suppose she’d seen such behaviour often enough from the soldiers here.
‘Forgive me,’ I began. ‘I did not mean to startle you. I’m looking for a man.’ I took her for a local, for no camp whore could have been this wizened and old. Wrapped up in woollen cloaks against the cold, she was tiny and frail, shrunken in her dotage. Her face was a wrinkled mask and it peered at me with alarm.
‘Plenty of men,’ she muttered. ‘More men than the Lord knows what to do with.’ She stumbled back but managed to keep her footing. Nor did she drop the bundle in her arms, wrapped up in cloth and clutched close to her breast.
‘He was in this lane only a moment ago. I believe he came from there.’ I pointed around the turn of the road at the cottage from which I’d stolen. The camp guard still loitered outside, propping himself lazily against the stone wall. ‘You may have seen him before.’
The old woman followed my gesture. Her eyes lingered oddly over the cottage.
‘The old Fletcher house,’ I began, sensing something.
The woman blinked up at me. ‘I didn’t see him,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see anything.’ She tucked her head down, stepped around me and began to shuffle back up the lane.
I caught her easily. Something felt wrong. ‘You must have seen him,’ I began. ‘I gave chase to him only a moment ago and right before your eyes!’ I had my hand on her shoulder and she was tense beneath it. She whirled back and it must have come as a surprise to her to escape so easily, for she immediately lost her balance. She staggered and crashed into the corner of a wall and the bundle in her arms slipped out of her grasp, landing intact in the snow some feet away. As I moved to help her and offer my apology, her eyes lit with a fire and she let fly with a string of invective, cursing me and every other soldier in the camp. I stepped back, surprised by the demon I’d unwittingly unleashed. Still muttering of every vile thing she wished the Lord would send to repel us, she tottered past me and reached out to pick up her bundle.
I saw her hands then. At first I thought she was wearing gloves, threadbare things that opened in patches to show her pale wrinkled skin underneath; but then I understood that I was wrong. Her hands were stained. They were pale in patches but with a blackness worked into the open skin around her fingernails and the creases in her knuckles.
Black ink.
I made as if to help her up and, though she wriggled away again, I was now certain. ‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘My name is Falkland. Might I have yours?’
She stumbled away from me and hurried on down the road.
‘Please,’ I called. ‘I must speak to you.’
‘A moment gone you were wanting to speak to a man. Now it’s me? You youngsters don’t know whether it’s summer or winter.’
It had been some time since anybody called me a youngster. ‘I’ll not waste any of your time.’
‘You’re wasting it already.’ She turned abruptly along the road that ran before the surgeon’s house. A little way past it she stopped and turned again towards a cottage door. As she reached for the handle I rushed to her side and took it myself, closing my fist over the top of her hand. Instantly she squirmed away. I leaned a little closer as she opened the door.
‘I need to speak with you about the printing press.’
She pushed between me and the door, opened it and waddled inside, and without hesitation I followed. Once she’d gone over the threshold, she looked back. I could hardly see her face any longer, hidden in the shadows of the hall, but I’d not gone three steps when there came a chorus of cries from within and a tide of squabbling children poured out of a doorway along the hall and began tugging at the old woman’s hems, yawning and rubbing their eyes. There were three boys and a girl, and I was certain there were more elsewhere in the cottage, for surely this amount of din could not have been made by such a small group. The youngest could barely walk and was being helped along by the eldest, a girl who might have been seven or eight. In the gloom I was startled to see how she looked like my own Charlotte. She had the same long nose and sad eyes and she wore her hair tied back in the fashion that Charlotte had always begged her mother to make – two tails plaited together at each side.
It had been too long since I last saw any children. I didn’t know, until that moment, that such a thing could trouble me but I felt a great lurching in my breast. When I tried to speak, something was stopping me, like a mangled cork forced back into a bottle of wine. In my own youth I’d never imagined having children. I was to be a farmer, married to the land, and I didn’t think much beyond that. When Caro came into my life I still didn’t aspire to fatherhood in any real way. Indeed, I would have been content for Caro and I to live out our days without the smiles and squalls of sons and daughters; but when my son John was born – and after him Charlotte – all of that changed. I knew myself suddenly for a man who, in some dark corner of himself, had always wanted fatherhood. And as I watched them grow, I’d known no greater joy. Over the years of war through which I’d barely seen them I’d pushed all that away. It caught me now, rising up from somewhere deep, hard enough to bring a tear to my eye. They were children when I left them. By now they would be children no more.
The little ones squabbling at the old woman’s hems stopped when they saw me and retreated behind her as if this tiny, frail creature was herself a fortress. They risked only little peeps around her legs. It was a horror to me that I could frighten children like that. I knew they took me for a New Modeller, the sort of man who had marched into their small world and turned it into a wintry Hell, and so I didn’t blame them; it was better that they were frightened of this sort of man than open and trusting. Yet still it cut me to the quick.
‘Away, away!’ the old woman shrieked. ‘Soon, sweethearts of mine.’ She swept the children along the hall and into one of the rooms that sat alongside it. For a moment she disappeared with them and I stood alone in the darkness, listening to the muted chatter through the walls. The children were eager to tell her things but she hushed them before any could form a full sentence. When she reappeared, I saw her hands were empty of the bundle she’d been carrying. She had only a rag in her hands with which she was desperately wiping the ink away – or else kneading it further into her skin.
‘Well then? What do you want?’ She hobbled along the hallway into the scullery at its end. I followed. The windows here spilled more of the wintry moonlight into the room. The glass was frosted by ice so that only vague shapes could be seen of the world outside.
‘You were in the Fletcher house.’
‘I have a business to be,’ she snapped. I was shocked to hear how viciously one so old could snarl. I supposed she’d had many more years of practice. ‘Not like you. You’re nothing but a sorry intruder . . .’ She stopped, as if daring me to interject. I was silent. ‘I heard you,’ she said. ‘Don’t think I didn’t. I’m old, not deaf. I knew there was somebody poking around. Do you know that place used to be a home? I know it doesn’t mean a lot to men like you but this used to be a good place. A safe place. Oh we had our trials and troubles just like everybody else. But – well, this is a different world now.’
‘Mrs . . .’
‘Miller,’ s
he returned, with the same wolfish bite. ‘Beatrice Miller.’ The guard outside the cottage had mentioned an old Mrs Miller and let slip that she had taken Tom Fletcher under her wing. The only surprise was that I had found her there in the dead of night.
‘You have me wrong, Mrs Miller. I’m not with the New Model.’ Saying it reminded me of what Fairfax had said to me when last we met: that I was not a pressed man but still a prisoner.
‘You play a fine part, Mister Falkland. You dress like one, you talk like one, you even force your way into our homes like one.’ There was little I could say to that given she was speaking the truth. ‘Oh, don’t look at me like that!’ she sighed. ‘I’m too old to play games. Too old to be polite to soldiers. King or Parliament, it doesn’t matter to me. It isn’t going to be my world much longer. But those poor children in there . . .’ She waved a hand dismissively. ‘Ah, what would you care? Spit it out, Mister Falkland, and then be gone – what do you want?’ She studied me carefully. She had a waspish look about her still, as if at any moment she might subject me to her poisonous sting.
‘Might I see them?’ I asked.
If it was a surprise to her that I asked, it was even more of a surprise to me. I tried to quell any thoughts of John and Charlotte because I knew from bitter experience down which roads that would take me: where were they? What had become of our home? Had John run away to war as I often feared? Had Caro and Charlotte remained untouched by marauding soldiers?
‘Why would you want to see them?’
‘Please,’ I began, my voice barely a whisper. ‘Sometimes a man just wants to see something decent.’
I think she understood. She nodded curtly and shuffled me out of the way so that she might get to the door through which the children had gone. ‘They’re not mine,’ she said, as if such a thing were even possible. ‘The girl’s my daughter’s but she’s gone now. And the rest – just boys from the village. They have to go somewhere.’
