by S. J. Deas
‘I had thought,’ I said, ‘there might be others now.’
She shook her head slowly. We faced each other now and my legs formed a guard around hers. I took her hand. ‘What have you found, Falkland?’ she whispered.
I did not know. I had found – a story. A connection. The fact that Edmund Carew knew both Hotham and Tom Fletcher seemed much more than coincidence and I’m not a man who cares much for the vagaries of chance and fate. Perhaps I was that way once, but now there must be a reason for everything that happens. To admit there was no reason would be to admit that it was just cruel fate that took me away from my dear wife and children – and to admit that would be to admit nobody was to blame. I wasn’t ready for that.
‘Have you seen this?’ I asked. I let go of her hand though she seemed unwilling and it took me a lingering moment to tease my fingers free. From my pocket I produced the pages of the pamphlet I’d stolen away from the children of Mrs Miller. ‘The dead boy Tom was distributing it.’
She looked at the pages for only a moment before she handed them back. ‘Falkland,’ she said. ‘It’s incomplete.’
‘Incomplete?’
When she didn’t quickly reply, I faltered. She shuffled away from me and looked shamefaced. ‘Falkland. I don’t know what the pamphlet says because I cannot rightly read.’ She paused. ‘Don’t look at me like that. I’m no lady of letters, but I’ve never pretended to be. I’m a servant, Falkland. To men like you.’
‘You have me wrong,’ I said. ‘I’m a farmer.’
‘A farmer?’ She snorted: ‘Perhaps you were a farmer once, Falkland, but look at you now! You’re an intelligencer for Oliver Cromwell himself! You’ll never be a farmer again. A common man might rise to be a politician but he doesn’t return to the land.’
Perhaps she was right but it was a terrible thing to know that this, now, was how the world looked on me: not as a farmer, lost in the city as I once was; nor as a common soldier, pressed into service and rising, however unwillingly, through the valour of combat. I was a man in the employ of the nation’s oppressors. I could barely stand it to think that an honest, decent woman such as Kate would see me in such a way.
She took my hand again, gently, perhaps sensing the loathing I felt for myself in that moment. ‘The pamphlet,’ she said. ‘Might it mean something to your investigation?’
I nodded. ‘I’ve a terrible feeling it might mean everything.’
‘In that case, Falkland,’ she said, drawing herself high, ‘I cannot tell you what is in the missing pages . . . but perhaps I can show you the pages themselves.’
She led me up the stairs. They creaked and complained underfoot but we took them lightly for we were not alone in the house. At the top was the small room with the single pallet where Warbeck laid his head when he passed the night here at all. In the second room, Miss Cain slept. Now she led me through that door. The windows were shuttered and the air thick with motes of dust but she lit a candle that spread fingers of light across the room. Against one wall there stood a bed, dressed down with blankets folded at the end, and against a wooden chair stood a scabbard with no blade inside. An embroidery hung on the wall, a biblical verse picked out in black stitches with flowers growing up and down the frame. Caro had one just the same, a work she’d slaved over as a young woman and expected to pass to our daughter and our daughter’s daughter for generations to come. Standing here I felt as if I was at the frontier between a long, happy past and a long, uncertain future. This had been Miss Cain’s family’s home once; come the spring, perhaps there would be no family to survive.
‘Shut the door,’ she said.
I did as I was told while Miss Cain skirted the bed and lifted her hems and knelt to open a chest around the other side. In it were folded clothes, some tied with string. I saw a green tunic, a woollen shawl, a dagger buckled inside a glittering scabbard. These, I deduced, were family trinkets, things she’d somehow managed to deny the New Model. On top of them all were pieces of crumpled paper.
‘Here,’ she said. She smoothed them and passed them to me across the stark bed. I took them. My fingers touched hers. We held the pose.
She let go of the pamphlet but I let go of it too and it fluttered onto the bed between us. ‘I was the King’s man,’ I breathed. I could hardly force the words out. ‘Not Cromwell’s. But I spoke up against my King once. Believe it or not it’s the reason I’m here. Cromwell told me he needed a man of good conscience in a place like this. He did not mean Crediton. He meant the New Model.’
There seemed a new spark in her eyes. ‘What did you do,’ she began, ‘to speak up to your King?’
‘I had a man hanged,’ I said, refusing to swallow the words however ugly they seemed. ‘A ravisher. I did as Cromwell would have done, though the King told me not to. I thought afterwards that I might lose my head for it but at the time I didn’t care. I didn’t want to serve a king who saw it fit to let his soldiers . . .’
My voice was trembling. Those days in Yorkshire would always be a part of me. They had, I thought, been directing my movements ever since. Had I been a coward that day and done as my King expected then I would have been hanged at Newgate. There would have been no reprieve. I wanted to think it would have been better that way but I couldn’t. And it wasn’t because I was thinking of my wife. It wasn’t because I was thinking of my son John and my daughter Charlotte, no matter how much I loved them. It was because I was here in this room, staring at Miss Kate Cain with her short black hair and her emerald eyes, studying the crumpled contours of her face where the soldiers had taken to her with their fists.
‘I would hang them for hitting you,’ I quaked. ‘Purkiss and whichever men he brought with him. Fairfax for sending them to do it. I’d hang them up in the town square. I’d draw and quarter them.’
‘Falkland,’ she whispered. ‘William . . . They did not . . . They did no more than you see. Purkiss and his sort, they’re not good men but nor are they bad. They’re simply men.’
She reached down and picked the pamphlets up from the bed and handed them back to me. ‘I found them in the scullery of the Fletcher cottage as I made my way out. I waited for you. I tried to give them to you. I thought . . .’ When I took them I felt her fingers again. This time I clasped her wrist with my hand and she didn’t resist. I moved forward, one knee on top of the bed, and she mirrored the movement on the opposite side. We were so close that I could feel the warmth of her breath, her lip dark and bulging where a soldier’s hand had struck her. My own hand danced up her arm until I softly stroked the marks. She winced as my touch feathered her but stopped herself from retreating. With my other hand I cupped the back of her head. Her hair was like down, like the soft fur that topped my daughter’s head on the day she was born.
My lips were almost with hers when I drew quickly away. I rose, the pamphlet scrunched in my hand, and hurried to the door. I stood on the threshold. Her words, I thought, might have described all the thousands of men that made up this New Model: not one thing and not another; not good and not bad; neither roundhead nor cavalier.
‘He would be a bad man if I found him now,’ I admitted, turning to take another lingering look at her, still hovering over the bed. ‘Miss Cain, I beg your forgiveness.’
I turned and walked the passageway and down the stairs, back to the sanctity of my own room – but as I went I couldn’t keep myself from hearing, over and over again, the whispered words that followed me. ‘Falkland,’ she said, ‘there’s nothing to forgive.’
I lay alone for hours after that, unable to sleep and yet unable to bring myself to read the pamphlet in my fingers. I didn’t hear anything thereafter. I supposed Miss Cain had gone to her bed for the night was already long in the tooth. Yet whenever I closed my eyes I imagined a different night. Catching myself dreaming of it was a curious form of punishment, like being outflanked by two opposing armies with no possibility of escape. The fleeting images I had of Kate, pinned underneath me or else arching above, were a torment themsel
ves; but a torment greater still were the pictures that punctuated them – of the country church where I was wed to my Caro, of the grey afternoon when I was summoned with weary joy by the midwife to be introduced to my firstborn son.
I must have lain there for an age before the pictures ebbed away and left me. It wasn’t only a weariness that assailed me. It was a foreign kind of empty desolation. I skirted the edge of sleep but it wouldn’t take me. I got to thinking I was less a man than I was a ghost already. I walked in a world that wasn’t my own. I had no allegiances. I had no great love nor great hate for the people I had around me. I was an island. And then, very slowly, my thoughts returned to the boys: to Richard Wildman and Samuel Whitelock, to Tom Fletcher and even Jacob Hotham who stood apart from the rest, a roundhead strung up just the same as those poor cavaliers. Something bound these boys together. At last I heaved myself up from the bed and drew close to the guttering candle. In the dead heart of the night I unfolded the papers Kate had brought for me and assembled them into the pamphlet they were meant to be.
On the front was the familiar woodcut drawing of the malevolent face in the flames. Inside were the passages I’d already read – the oaths of allegiance, carefully rewritten to omit Parliament’s allegiance to the divinely appointed King; the proclamation of Boy’s death, so mockingly worked up with NECROMANCY and DEVILL in bold lettering. At the centre of the pamphlet was a discourse I’d not yet seen. It drew my eye instantly. At the top of the page were the words ON THE DISCOVERIES OF WITCHES. The lettering beneath was small and dense with only odd words leaping out of the page: POPISH WICKEDNESS and INCARNATE SOULDIERS were only the most prominent of a dozen and more such phrases.
I read from the top:
I had a feeling like Hell itself in my stomach. It wasn’t the soup Miss Cain had served nor my tempestuous carnal imaginings. I’d not heard of this Matthew Hopkins before, nor of any man fool enough to name himself witch-finder, but I’d heard the word right enough. My father once taught me that the worst devils are the devils that men make up. It’s not lore that any churchman or nobleman would suffer gladly, but there was wisdom enough in it. This wasn’t the first time I had heard of witches or witchcraft around this camp. It was what Kate had thought of me when Fairfax had brought me to her door.
There was more. Much more. The type was so tiny that I fancied it made up almost half of the pamphlet even though it was only printed on its innermost leafs. It wasn’t a surprise to me to know that men like this Hopkins, styling themselves the vanquishers of devils, might be abroad in the kingdom as it faltered. There will always be men to prey on the superstitions of the weak and never more than in a time of war. What gave me the strongest feeling of foreboding was a question for which I could not have an answer: why did Hopkins’ pamphlet form a part of this work put together by New Modellers? What did Carew and Hotham have to gain by distributing his message around the camp?
I read on:
I meant to read on, for now there was something compelling about the answers Hopkins gave as narrated by his companion John Stearne. It sounded to me like the same vindictive railing I’d seen in this camp and indeed across the country – of one kind of man taking joy in torturing another. Yet as I squinted at the papers, a sudden sound tore me away. I stood up. The sound came again and I had the instinctual sense that I was cornered as I’d been outside Abingdon when I was finally captured.
The sound came again and I realised that somebody was tapping very softly on the shutters across my window. My hand went to my hip but I had no dagger there and never would have while I remained in this camp. I crept to the shutters and lifted the latch to see who was outside. I will admit that a large part of me feared a rock thrown through the window or for musket fire lighting the night. At once the very idea seemed laughable – an assassin does not announce himself by tapping at a window as though he’s your long-lost love; still, my heart pounded in my breast, its thunderous rhythm instructing me that I was too old and weary to fling myself about like a young man.
I drew myself up and craned out into the night. The sky was overcast and swollen with snow. Indeed, thin flakes were falling already, presaging a tumultuous fall to come. I could smell it in the air. In the street in front of me stood a figure. At first I could make out little but his frame, tall and spindly. He wore a coat fastened high around his neck and great gloves that made him appear bigger than he was. He had no hat but his hair was frosted with sparkling crystals of ice.
‘Who goes there?’ I hissed. I could see only a vague outline of his face. He had a nose like a hawk.
‘Are you the intelligencer?’
That word was beginning to grate, no matter if it was true. All the same I told him he was correct.
‘Sir, you must come with me.’
‘Come with you where?’
‘Sir, please . . .’ His voice seemed suddenly frayed and I wondered if his baritone commands of only moments ago had been an act he was finding hard to continue. ‘Must I beg?’
I risked glances up and down the street. All was dark and I could see no other man abroad, not even a camp guard making his rounds. From here I couldn’t even see the light of the fires that surrounded Crediton. The world appeared strangely at peace. ‘No,’ I said, ‘not beg.’ I paused. The man shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. I still couldn’t see his face. ‘But what is this about?’
His voice broke. It was only then, in the way he croaked his words, in the way he had to force them out, that I knew he was genuine. ‘Thomas Fletcher,’ he finally said. ‘We saw you by his old home. We heard you were . . . asking questions. If you want to know how he died, you’ll come with me.’ He paused once again. ‘Please, sir.’ Again his voice faltered. I could not tell whether he was dread fearful or distraught. Either way, I owed it to those dead boys to hear what he had to say.
I nodded my assent and closed the shutters.
Alone in my room I took haste to dress myself and put on my boots, forcing my swollen feet into each one. Thomas Fletcher, they told me, was not a boy with many friends. What friends he had were his family and they were gone already. I didn’t know who the soldier in the street was but I was certain of one thing; he was not the sort of man to befriend a small, cowardly boy like Thomas Fletcher.
I crept along the hall and up the stairs past Warbeck’s door. Outside Miss Cain’s room I stopped. My hand hovered on the handle. I wanted to push in, to wake her and tell her where I was going, yet I hesitated. The worst of it was the reason – that a very large part of me wished I’d returned here some hours before.
I tapped on the door and turned the handle. I could hear her breathing now, soft and steady, quietly asleep. I eased into the room. At once she stirred.
‘Falkland . . . ?’ she whispered, rising and turning to me. She was wrapped in a shawl but wore little else. In the gloom I couldn’t see the swollen patterns of her face.
‘Miss Cain,’ I began, ‘I’m sorry to have woken you.’
She rubbed her eyes and showed no alarm that I’d crept into her bedroom in the dead of night. As I came closer she reached out a hand and touched my leg. I was suddenly glad of the man waiting down by the door.
‘There is something I must do,’ I said.
She drew away. I sensed her puzzlement.
‘Kate, there’s one thing you might do for me.’
‘What is it, Falkland?’
‘Miss Cain,’ I said. ‘I shall need a knife. A dagger would be best but a blade from the kitchen would suffice.’
CHAPTER 20
The soldier in the street was impatient. He stood some distance from the house and beckoned me to join him. As I approached, I felt for Miss Cain’s scullery knife secreted at my back and did as I was told; it was only as I came close that the starlight finally pulled his face from the shadows and I recognised him: Lucas, the surgeon. It had only been days since I’d seen him, a man no older than twenty-five suddenly in charge of all the invalids the New Model coughed up, but it seeme
d much longer. If he knew who I was or recognised me from that day as I did him, he was working hard not to show it. He barely fixed me with a look as he turned and began to shuffle away.
‘You treated Thomas Fletcher,’ I began, ‘after he was found?’
He mumbled something I didn’t catch and led me along the street, past the inn and the chestnut tree with its hanging man. Over the rooftops I could see the spire of Crediton church and then at last the glow of red and orange from the fires pitting the encampment.
‘Did you treat the hanged brothers too?’ I asked.
I was getting used to the idea that he didn’t want to respond when he stopped, dug his heels into the snow and turned. It was only a half-turn, just enough for me to make out his lips. He kept his eyes downcast. ‘There wasn’t any treating to do,’ he said. ‘I’m a surgeon, not a sorcerer.’ He was trembling, and not simply from the cold.
‘Not a witch,’ I breathed, remembering the pamphlet.
I stirred a reaction in him but not one I expected. His face screwed up and his eyes lifted and for a second it seemed as if his gaze was locked into mine. There was terror in those eyes. It was the terror of a little boy on a dark night, camping out with his father with a head full of stories of devils and their familiars. It seemed laughable that a grown man could recreate such an expression, but there it was.
‘You should not talk of the dead,’ he whispered.
He led me on a familiar route along Main Street. The snow began to fall in ribbons of white. The further we walked, the more thickly it came down, until I wondered if we’d crossed the frontier one storm makes with the next. I was thankful there was no wind to whip it at my face but it was hypnotic. There’s a magic in falling snow. It makes all the world seem the same, even if underneath one patch of ground is vastly different to the other: one corner for the roundheads, one corner for the cavaliers; one corner for the Puritans, one corner for Catholics clinging to their rosaries and praying not to be discovered.
