William Falkland 01 - The Royalist

by S. J. Deas

  ‘So united that half its officers are under suspicion?’ I said. ‘Some of them even having to be spied upon . . .’ I said that more pointedly than I might have done, for we all knew what I meant. ‘So united that Cromwell sends his own man and does not trust his general?’

  ‘So they start printing these pamphlets,’ Kate said. ‘With pictures of devils and witch-finders and instructions on how a man can tell a witch for himself.’

  ‘It says it bold as day – this Matthew Hopkins is a witch-finder through his knowledge and experience, not through any sorcery of his own.’

  ‘And they have that boy Fletcher distributing the pamphlets?’

  I nodded. ‘The stories start to take hold. Royalists are being spat on already. It only takes a little push, another bastard telling that story about Boy, for the idea to start breeding. Royalists, Catholics, devil whores – they’re all the same thing. What’s needed now is some evidence. Just a little. Something that proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that there are sorcerers inside this camp . . .’

  With a suddenness, I lunged and stabbed Warbeck in the arm, right where it met his shoulder. The blade disappeared, seemingly sinking into his flesh. Warbeck’s eyes flew wide. He lurched back and jumped to his feet, reaching for his sabre, and then stopped.

  ‘Falkland!’

  I pushed the pamphlet towards him. ‘According to what is written here,’ I said, ‘you are a sorcerer, a plaything of the devil.’

  I showed him the blade. I watched the wonder in his eyes as he looked at the wound he thought I’d given him, as he touched it with his fingers and found they came away dry, that he was not injured at all, not even marked. Miss Cain took the knife and pressed it slowly into her own palm. She trembled, for now she understood what I had realised back under the tree.

  Bitterly, Warbeck pushed me aside. ‘Don’t suicides go to Hell, Falkland?’

  ‘You can hardly call it suicide,’ I spat. I could not stop my mind from straying to that terrible moment when Wildman and Whitelock felt the rope around their necks; I’d so nearly joined them. ‘I’ll wager Carew looked among those he knew to be royalists and Catholics. Most would be too level-headed to be tricked. They’d find the young ones, the most naïve, the most susceptible. If you drag a man to the edge of a cliff and tell him to jump then it’s a fool who jumps. But Warbeck, if you tell him to jump or be damned, if you make him believe . . .’ I slipped the dagger into my belt and took a final slug of wine. ‘And then when hundreds of Puritan boys around you have seen how a few royalists truly are in league with the devil, how long is it before the lynchings start? How long before the only evidence anyone needs is a rosary or a crucifix or a whispered word in the dark?’

  I marched into the hallway. Miss Cain hurried after. ‘It doesn’t explain Hotham,’ she said. ‘If what Carew said was true, if it was Hotham running the printing press, then why would he end up hanging from that branch as well?’

  I kicked the chair out of the way. ‘It doesn’t explain Fletcher either. But if you have a thread, at least you can follow it. Perhaps that part of Carew’s story was true. Or perhaps Wildman’s friends wished to show that they, too, were capable.’ I remembered their words: we do not consider the scales balanced.

  Kate seized my arm. ‘What will you do?’ she demanded. ‘You can’t go out there again!’

  ‘I’ll do what I was sent here to do. I’ll reveal what happened to those boys. I’ll make my report to Fairfax and then to Cromwell.’ I stopped. I fancied I could even feel the rope chafing my neck. ‘Then my debt is done. Then I’m gone.’

  I opened the door with a flourish, half expecting to see Carew and his pikemen ranged around. All that I saw was whiteness, the hypnotic snow still falling gently down. Before crossing the threshold I stopped. ‘Miss Cain,’ I said. ‘I have to cross the camp. I have to reach Black Tom. Once it’s with him they have no cause to come after us. Stay here with Warbeck and open the door to no one until morning.’

  Warbeck had come out into the hall as well now. He shook his head. ‘Are you mad, Falkland? Now you’ll close that door and listen to me.’

  CHAPTER 22

  In the hallway, Warbeck held me fast. He spoke more words in those few minutes, I think, than over all the days of our journey from London, and yet, as he related his tale, I could not see how I could claim any one part of it to be a surprise. Cromwell had indeed sent an intelligencer to survey the New Model Army but I was merely a cloak. While Black Tom had his eyes on me, Warbeck was at work, the real intelligencer.

  ‘We’ll go to Fairfax in time,’ said Warbeck when he was done, ‘but I’ll watch and wait a while and see what this Carew does before I burst through Black Tom’s doors.’

  And the boys, the suicides, the witching tree? Cromwell could hardly care. What were they to him? Merely a convenient excuse. But to me, now, they had become something more.

  ‘Find where Carew camps, Falkland. Keep your eyes on him.’ Warbeck turned away from me as if we were done, but we were not. I caught his shoulder and spun him back to face me.

  ‘I will do no such thing,’ I told him. ‘Whatever you and Cromwell have hatched between you, I mean to go to Black Tom. I mean to confront him with what is happening right under his nose. At his own press! And I will not be moved on this by anything short of a musket ball.’

  Warbeck regarded me coldly. ‘If needs be, Falkland. I would prefer not, but if needs be.’

  ‘And will you shoot me too?’ demanded Kate.

  I pushed for the door. ‘I’ll go alone,’ I said.

  ‘And if Carew and his gang come while you are gone?’ Kate asked.

  Warbeck bared his teeth and graced us both again with his rotten breath. It took all his will, I think, to relent. ‘We go together then. All of us. But Falkland, I implore you to caution! Do not barge in to Black Tom’s house full of half-grown accusation!’

  We exited the cottage, finally, onto the lane. I was still in Crediton, the same as it ever was, but now I felt as if there were eyes all over me, watching from the narrow lanes between the cottages. We came to the square where the dead man hung. I thought his hollow, crow-pecked sockets followed us across the untouched snow. In his shadow we stopped. Behind us trails of footprints were imprinted deep into the white blanket of fresh snow. Though flakes still twirled gently over the town, they would not come thickly enough to mask the way we’d gone. Our tracks were plain and so were several others that had come this way before us. If we were not yet being followed then it was only a matter of time.

  ‘I’ll meet you at the farm!’ hissed Warbeck. He doubled back towards the inn and its stables and I fancied I knew why. I did not much like what I thought it meant: Warbeck was preparing to run.

  We didn’t see another soul as we slipped through the middle of the town to where the hulk of Crediton church still sat. Along the lane running to the north – the one that would take us to the hanging tree – lights glowed in the windows of the surgeon’s house. I stopped dead, hidden in the shadows at the end of the lane as two figures emerged and hurried towards us. For a second it felt as if we were outmanoeuvred – the church on one flank, the surgeon’s house on the other. I pulled back, casting my eyes for a place to hide. ‘We’ll have to find another way around,’ I said, my eyes still fixed on the men heading towards us.

  Kate scurried us away towards the graveyard. ‘He’s still in there, isn’t he?’ she whispered. ‘Jacob Hotham?’

  ‘Hotham and the rest, if I’m right. Carew already knows I was in his printing press. He knows I have his dagger. It won’t be long before he understands that I’ve pieced it together. He’ll think I’m going for Jacob.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘There’s a time for everything,’ I whispered. ‘Perhaps he won’t be watching for us to go to Black Tom instead.’

  We retreated behind the church by one of the thin, winding alleys around the back of the graveyard, up the cobbled shambles where a butcher’s shop sat silent. In the narrow alleys among
the cottages behind the church were places where the snow hadn’t reached any real depth and others where the wind had piled huge drifts we were forced to scale as we went. We followed the garden plots where villagers had once kept their vegetable patches, chopped their wood and cared for their chickens, and emerged from the edge of Crediton on its southern slopes. The encampment was sparser here where the winds could howl in from the moors and bury men in snow as they slept, but the tents still spilled around. Between them, low border fires burned inside circles of rock.

  ‘Where does Carew camp?’ Kate whispered as we edged around the town, keeping to the dark tract of land between the end of the cottages and the first of the tents. I hesitated to answer. I didn’t know and regretted now that I’d not followed him already. He’d come this way when I’d given chase earlier tonight. If I was right then he bedded down in the old Fletcher house close to his printing press – or else in the surgeon’s quarters where he could keep watch over Hotham. Nonetheless I was wary. Here and there I could see soldiers unable to sleep, tramping the feeling back into their toes, bending low to stoke their fires or else keeping their lonely, meandering watches. Any one of them, I supposed, might have been Carew or his pikemen. Any one of them might have relayed a message. How many did he have already drawn to his cause? I had no way to know.

  Kate led me away from the bulk of the camp, pressing steadily from the town. In this way we came to the small frozen river that, further downstream, ran close to Fairfax’s farmhouse. Perhaps the ground here had been boggy before it froze – whatever the reason, there were no tents so close to the river. The snow was heavy and we had to plunge through it but at least there was little danger of being seen. We reached the field where the horses were corralled and crept around it. A little stone structure squatted on one side with a great bonfire heaped in front; it was more important, or so it seemed, to guard over these horses than any of the boys in the camp. We crossed the little bridge and I saw from the tracks in the snow that others had crossed not long before us. Ahead, Fairfax’s farmhouse loomed at us at the top of a gentle slope. Even though the way wasn’t steep, somehow it seemed to lord itself over the encampment. There were fires burning inside and a thin plume of smoke rose, dissipating quickly in the snow.

  The sky shifted, came apart and closed again. The snowfall strengthened.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. Again I felt eyes watch us along the way but it wasn’t until we came into the grounds of the farmhouse itself that I had cause to pause. From this distance, through the twirling snowflakes, I could see two men stationed outside the farmhouse door. A third stood at a distance, warming his hands over a low fire, sheltered from the snow by what used to be a chicken coop.

  ‘Do you see?’ I asked.

  Kate drew close to my side. She pressed against me and I was thankful for the warmth. Her eyes found mine. ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘The snow,’ I said. ‘Kate, look at the snow.’

  The snow around the entrance to the farmhouse was carved up, criss-crossed with the tramping tracks of the guardsmen as they moved back and forth to stave off the bitterness of night, their footsteps dulled and softened by later falls. Yet there was another trail, one that cut across the full expanse of the grounds. It ran from the low stone wall heaped up with snow where we were standing to the door of the farmhouse itself. The prints were crisp and deep, more defined than the confusion where the guards had tramped.

  ‘One of the guards?’ Kate offered. ‘Caught short?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said.

  ‘Or Black Tom, out on some errand?’

  ‘Fairfax should be sleeping.’ I studied the tracks. ‘Besides, these are the prints of a man heading within from without, and in some hurry. Someone has come this way before us.’

  ‘But who . . . ?’

  I looked at her intently. ‘Find yourself somewhere safe,’ I said. ‘Wait for Warbeck. But please don’t go far. I’ve needed you already tonight.’

  ‘I was there, wasn’t I?’ she said. I thought she was challenging me but she did so with a smile.

  ‘I may yet need you again.’ I turned. I had a mind to follow the stone wall, circle the farmhouse before the guards knew I was there and judge it from every angle I could. Fairfax, I was sure, was within; but I knew now that he was not alone.

  I had only moved a short distance when I spied another figure hurrying along our tracks from the bridge. I tensed, ready to ambush him from behind the wall if I must, but as he approached I saw it was Warbeck. I waited for him to come closer before I revealed myself, then pointed to the tracks in the snow. He understood at once as I thought he might.

  ‘Carew?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know yet. Go to Kate!’ I told him. ‘Don’t let her out of your sight.’

  He laughed at me. ‘I think not! If Carew has gone to Black Tom then everything is changed.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Warbeck gave me a pitying look and began creeping closer to the shuttered farmhouse windows, lurking in the shadows to hide from the sleepy watch of the two wandering guards. My heart demanded I should take Kate and be away, take her somewhere safe. But in the end I’d come too far for these boys to abandon them at the last. I followed him without further word, though I fancied Kate watched me for the longest time, at least until I’d gone out of sight round the back of the farmhouse.

  There were no guards stationed outside the back door. Here the night was truly silent and the snow untouched but for Warbeck’s footsteps. I followed them as best I could. I didn’t have time to fear I was being watched – we were leaving a trail any halfwit could have followed if they happened upon it – and, as I came to the first broad window, I crouched low to scuttle underneath. The curtains were drawn in the bay but there was light inside. I fancied there had been a fire whose embers now glowed in the hearth. I crept close, pressed hard against the icy stone, and listened for voices on the other side. When I could hear nothing I edged to the handle of the back door and cupped my fist around it. Gently I turned it but the door, held fast by latches on the other side, didn’t move. It wasn’t until I released my hold and fell panting against the stone that I realised how rigidly I’d been holding myself. My breath made a mist around my head and I could hardly see.

  The lights were brighter in the second window. I reeled through what little I knew of inside the farmhouse – the entrance hall, the big, stark chamber where Fairfax first received me – and wondered if I was now crouching outside the very same room. From this corner of the farmhouse I could see the back of the stone shed where Fairfax had the captive he wanted strung up for the boys’ suicides. I supposed he must still be inside, huddled up under blankets thick with his own filth. Unless the cold had finally taken him.

  ‘Falkland!’ I barely heard Warbeck’s hiss, and even when I looked I couldn’t see him until he shifted a little and waved. He’d found himself a corner of blackest shadow right under that other window, pressed up against the wall, so dark as to make himself invisible.

  I shifted. Outside the stone cell a man was moving, another camp guard unable to stand sentry without pacing for the cold that gnawed at his bones. Instinctively I kept myself close to the wall, steeped in its shadow, desperate not to be seen. There were voices within. The more I held myself there, the more they came into focus. I pressed myself into the wall so I could hear them better.

  ‘He’s outside.’

  My heart thudded. The voice was familiar: Purkiss; and I thought for one dreadful moment that he was talking about me, that Purkiss somehow knew I was here. I looked one way and then the other, yet all I saw was pure white snow. I told myself I must be wrong but it did little to still my pulse.

  ‘You woke me for this?’ The second voice was Black Tom. I’d have known that thick Yorkshire burr anywhere.

  ‘I thought you’d want to know.’

  ‘Very well,’ Black Tom grunted. ‘Bring the bastard in.’

  I heard footsteps. More voices, too faint to make out th
e words, the rattle of a door being closed and then a third voice came from the room, high and haughty, everything Black Tom was not. ‘Sir,’ it began. ‘I beg thanks for receiving me. I am afraid I bring ill news.’

  Carew. From the moment I’d seen that trail of footprints across the virgin snow, I’d known who had woken Fairfax in the middle of the night. Known it but hoped it wasn’t so. I feared I already knew what story he was about to spill.

  ‘If it’s bad news, lad, I’d rather you spat it out.’

  ‘Very well, sir,’ said Carew. ‘It is the intelligencer. He knows about the pamphlets. He knows about Hopkins. Sir, I think he knows about Wildman and Whitelock, and I think he can prove it.’ Carew paused, as if steadying himself to receive a mighty blow. ‘General, he has my dagger.’

  There was silence. Even the snow seemed to hang in the air around my head. Then, like the cold, sharp shock of stepping onto thin ice and plunging into a frozen pool, there came the roar. From the voice I knew it to be Black Tom, but I’ve rarely heard a man sound so much like a devil, even on the battlefield with granadoes exploding and sabres flashing all around. ‘How did it come to it?’ he thundered.

  ‘General, we did as you bid. We lured him down to the tree and told him a story to satisfy him.’ Carew paused. I thought I could hear, for the first time, a wavering in his voice. ‘But he didn’t believe it. He had others with him. I’m afraid there was a skirmish.’

  ‘Your ambush was ambushed?’ Black Tom’s voice was full of scorn.

  ‘Sir, with the utmost respect—’

  ‘Think very carefully about what you’re about to say, Edmund. People who profess to show respect rarely mean it.’

  Carew was silent. For the longest time, nobody said a word.

  ‘How much does he know?’ Black Tom asked.

  ‘He’s been to the printing press. He has the dagger. And you already know, sir, that he followed the whores out of camp.’