William Falkland 01 - The Royalist

by S. J. Deas

  Light filtered down the stairs from a lamp on the balcony of the upper floor. I might hide away in the dark of the hall but there was no possibility I could ascend unseen if anyone was standing watch outside Hotham’s room. But I’d come this far. I couldn’t turn back; and so I walked to the stairs without any thought of trying to conceal myself, my hand on Warbeck’s sabre. To my surprise the balcony was empty. No one stood in my way or called out to challenge me. Carew must, I supposed, be in the room with Hotham himself.

  A stray thought troubled me then: why had Carew stayed in Crediton if he thought we’d escaped? If he’d sent men to ride after Warbeck and Kate, why hadn’t he gone with them? Or was Hotham too much a friend to abandon even when everything they’d worked for stood to be unravelled? I pushed the door open to Hotham’s room, sure I’d see Carew waiting for me, but no – Hotham was alone. A candle burned by his bed. He was awake, his eyes open, and he saw me clearly. He didn’t make a sound. Perhaps he couldn’t. I closed the door behind me.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ I whispered.

  Very slightly he nodded. His eyes never left me and they told me he could hear me and that he understood me, that behind his mangled body was a mind still alert. He opened his mouth a little as if trying to speak but all that came out was a strangled hiss of air.

  ‘Show me, however you wish, where I have this wrong,’ I said. ‘You printed pamphlets claiming that Catholics and men who fought for the King were witches and had turned to the devil. Was it Edmund Carew or was it you who had the notion of the false dagger?’ I stared at him but his eyes didn’t move. ‘Yours, I suspect, but Carew was the one who found those boys. He has the eye for it, I dare say, to find those boys whose minds are not so strong. Where did you do it? Did you take them down to the tree where they used to go for their confessions and hold them down as he stabbed them with his dagger? They thought they were going to die but you had something far worse in mind. I have to guess now but I’ll give you the benefit: you wanted them to desert. Just run away and be gone. Them and all the others like them. But Richard Wildman didn’t. When he thought this witch-finder of yours was coming, he didn’t run. He hanged himself. And then his brother did the same.’

  Hotham looked away for an instant. I had the truth of it then. ‘I’d like to think that what happened to you was something you did to yourself out of remorse when you knew what you’d done. Edmund Carew says you did it after Tom Fletcher died but I know that to be false. It wasn’t remorse at all, was it? Whitelock and Wildman had friends. Tom Fletcher, when he found out and realised what you’d done, when he realised that he’d been a part of it, he told them. After Whitelock, they came for you. They were going to do to you what you’d done to their friends, but Carew and the others came in time to save you. Was there a fight?’

  This time his eyes didn’t flinch. They blazed back at me, full of anger.

  ‘That’s why Carew never left your side after he cut you down. Because he thought they might come at you again. That’s why he blew poor Tom Fletcher up with a granadoe, because Tom was the one who’d told them.’

  ‘In fact, Falkland, it was Wildman’s friends who hanged poor Jacob,’ said Carew softly behind me. I hadn’t even heard the door open. ‘Not Whitelock’s.’ I didn’t feel the dagger at my back but I knew it must be there. Suddenly I understood: Carew had known I was here all along. Perhaps he’d seen Warbeck and Miss Cain ride off alone or perhaps it was mere instinct, but he knew that I’d stayed. I fancied then that he’d seen me lurking beside the steps as he’d come into the house. He’d chosen to wait for me here rather than face me in the street.

  ‘Black Tom wants to see you,’ he said.

  This I knew to be a lie but Carew had no means to know he’d been overheard on the porch of Fairfax’s farmhouse. I supposed he meant to do away with me somewhere along the way, in the dark where no one would see; I was sure he didn’t mean to run me through here in Hotham’s room if he could help it. I raised my hands. ‘Then that suits us both, since I also want to see him. Shall we both stand before him, Edmund, and tell him the truth from start to finish? I fancy he won’t shed a tear over two Catholic boys driven to hang themselves. I wonder, though, if he’ll have something to say about Tom Fletcher murdered by a granadoe.’

  ‘Come on, Falkland.’ This time I felt the press of the dagger and this time the point was real. I cast one last look at Jacob Hotham but his eyes gave away nothing. Perhaps he regretted what he’d done but I thought not. I think all that he regretted was what had been done to him in return.

  Carew backed away. ‘Slow now, Falkland. Don’t turn around.’

  I stepped backwards after him, out through the door and into the corridor to the balcony over the stairs. It was a simple mistake he made, one of a young man who hasn’t seen his share of real fighting. He had a dagger at my back, not a pistol. I let him nudge me forward a few steps to let him think I’d come meekly and then I ran, and as I ran I drew my sabre.

  He wasn’t as foolish as I’d hoped, though. As I reached the balcony across the stairs I thought I saw men in the darkness of the hall, perhaps four or five of them – certainly too many to bull through to the door. I ran past the stairs instead of down them and an instant later I knew I was right. A flash of light lit up their faces amid the boom of a pistol shot. I didn’t feel its burn so it must have missed me but I didn’t see where it flew. The corridor ahead sank into darkness.

  ‘After him!’ shouted Carew. ‘Don’t let him get away!’

  I whirled around, looking for escape, but Carew was pounding after me. I crashed into the first door I found, tumbling over empty cots, reaching for the shuttered window. I fancied I’d take my chances with a jump to the lane and pray for the snow to break my fall, for I was no match for four men with pistols and knives and Carew was right on my heels. I already knew he was faster than me.

  The shutters were latched. I spun around and Carew was right there. I had no choice. I turned to face him and stretched out the sabre. I don’t know what I thought. To drive him away, I think. To hold him back; but I did neither of those things. Perhaps he didn’t see it in the gloom but he ran headlong straight onto the point of the blade. I felt it drive into him, just beneath his breastbone, carried deeper by his weight as he stumbled forward. He fell at my feet and groaned.

  ‘You bastard, Falkland.’

  I let the sabre go and leapt away, uncertain how badly he was injured and with care for the dagger still in his hand. Footsteps were pounding up the stairs. My hands were shaking as I unlatched the shutters and threw them wide. I heard them at the door as I leapt from the window. My knees slammed into my chest as I crashed into the snow below, knocking the breath out of me. I rose and stumbled away as I heard them at the window, their shouts: ‘Murderer!’ Another pistol cracked. My ankle ached, twisted in the fall, but still I ran as fast as I could along the lane and across the end of it, into the darkness of the alley beside the church, the very alley down which I’d chased Carew at the start of this endless night. I didn’t know where to go or how, only that I had to be away. I ran as fast as I could, remembering the wall of ice at the end; this time fear gave strength to my legs and I vaulted it without falling. I was in the sprawl of the camp itself now. I even thought that I might get away but then I heard the cry across the night. ‘Murderer! Stop that man!’

  I knew then that I was doomed. I should have stopped as soon as I was in the camp and hidden. In the darkness amid the falling snow perhaps they would never have found me; and if I’d not frozen in the night then perhaps I might have made my escape in the morning. But I ran, and a man running headlong through a camp full of soldiers is easy prey. I don’t think I even saw the man who took me down. He came from the side while I was too busy casting my eyes behind me. I sprawled into the snow and pushed him away, flailing at him with my fists.

  I didn’t see his friend either but I felt his blow as he clubbed me down.

  CHAPTER 24

  Four times they tried to
kill me. They came for me on those blasted northern moors and I lived. They cut swathes through my fellows at Edgehill and somehow, deep in dead men, I came through. They routed my company outside Abingdon and cornered me in the thick of night when I had nowhere to run to and nobody to watch my back, but even then it wasn’t my end. They let me loose in the world just to have another chance of running me down. Yes, four times they tried to kill me.

  Fourth time lucky.

  They weren’t Carew’s men who battered me to the ground that night but they were no more gentle because of it. They beat me down and beat me again until I lost my senses. I have a dim notion they dragged me through the snow. They must have done. The next I knew for certain I was in a cell that stank of filth. It was difficult to know how long I’d been lying there. They’d bound my ankles in chains but, by some strange mercy, had not bound my hands. Even as the days passed, they never did that. Endless times I slipped in and out of consciousness, waking only when a camp guard appeared with thin helpings of pottage and handfuls of snow. I knew where I was. I was in the stone shed behind Black Tom’s farmhouse but Black Tom himself never came. The other man, the one Black Tom thought might serve as our scapegoat, was gone. Dead, I supposed. The cruel irony was that, lying there, I couldn’t even remember why I hadn’t simply shaken Fairfax’s hand, accepted his falsehoods and ridden off to discover what had become of my wife and children. In the end that was all that mattered. Not Whitelock and Wildman. Not Fletcher, no matter how wretchedly those boys had died.

  After the third week of it, I began to feel myself wasting away. My body had been living on borrowed time ever since they released me from Newgate. I felt I’d been dead since I first shook Oliver Cromwell’s hand. Sitting here now, smeared in my own filth, images of Kate drifted sluggishly across the backs of my eyes. I hoped she was safe, that she’d escaped and that Warbeck had found some honour buried in his black intelligencer’s heart. For myself I knew there had never really been a chance of being free.

  By then my body was revolting. I had pains even where they hadn’t beaten me. I was slowly starving. My guts were telling me to eat, to cram the very earth into my throat, but I wouldn’t. I lay there and listened to the sound of the wind around the stone walls, judging the snowfall by sudden changes in the quality of the air. I didn’t understand why they didn’t simply kill me and be done with it, what kept them from putting the rope around my neck, from declaring me a murderer and hanging me in the square. Perhaps this witch-finder Hopkins was already here, dealing out his godly justice, proclaiming boys right and left to be witches and sodomites for the devil. If that was delaying my hanging, if their gallows were too busy for me, then I didn’t care to think about it. I didn’t want to know. By then I didn’t know if it was day or night. I didn’t know if I was dead or alive.

  Just as I had in Newgate, I lost track of the days. It must have been the fourth week when the door of the prison opened, as it sometimes did, and a camp guard entered, stooping low so he didn’t bang his head. Outside there was struggling sunlight behind him, though I couldn’t say if it was dawn or dusk. The snow around the entrance was dirty and packed hard, so I knew there had been no fresh fall in the last few hours. It filled me with rage that I still noticed the details. It meant there was some little part of me that hadn’t quite abandoned all hope. Like my gut with its niggling pains, that mule-headed part of my soul just kept clinging on.

  I’d been lying on the ground, only the rags of an old red coat between me and the frozen earth. I hauled myself up to my elbows as he came in. It was then that I noticed another damnable detail. The guard wasn’t carrying a bowl. This time he wasn’t here to bring me food.

  ‘Now?’ I asked, hopeful.

  ‘I hate to do it to you, Falkland, but you’ll have to put your hands behind your back.’

  It was difficult to stand. My legs were weaker than in that winter in Oxford when I was fixed with a splint. All the same I did as I was told. I faced the other way and he bound my wrists with coarse twine.

  ‘You’re still eating this filth?’ he said, kicking one of the bowls he’d left behind some time ago.

  ‘I’m afraid it will ruin my main course,’ I said, still facing the wall as he fiddled with my chains.

  ‘We haven’t starved that tongue of yours, then.’

  He was right and I hated him for that. Whatever was left inside me that still wanted to live, it just couldn’t be knocked down.

  ‘Are you ready?’

  I nodded and began to turn. ‘Don’t you want to put a sack over my head?’ I asked.

  ‘A sack?’

  ‘It’s the way it was before,’ I shrugged.

  He led me to the door of the cell. After its constant gloom the world outside was blinding bright. I cringed. For what seemed to be the first time in long months the sun had broken through the snow clouds and its dazzling rays were reflected from deep mounds of white all around. I couldn’t see. ‘I’ve been here before,’ I said. ‘A sack over the head is the way these things work.’

  ‘Falkland, just keep your lips tight and walk.’

  I walked uneasily but I had to keep moving because he was marching behind me, one massive stride for every two shuffles of mine. In that way we crossed the snow and came to the front of the farmhouse. Two camp guards stood outside the door as they had on the night I came to confront Fairfax. They stood aside as I stumbled on, though one of them at least had the dignity to look dissatisfied about it. He propped himself lazily on his pike and spat into the snow as we went through. The heat within hit me like a wave. In the hallway I didn’t know where the fires were burning but it rushed out to engulf me. After so long in the cell I felt smothered. The warmth didn’t reinvigorate me so much as make my body remember what it had been missing, making every last inch of me tingle.

  I blundered to a halt.

  ‘Not now, Falkland,’ the guard said, propelling me forward with a hand in the small of my back. ‘On.’

  I stumbled through broad doors into the hall where Fairfax had first received me. The room was as stark and empty as I’d last seen it. A great fire leapt and crackled in the hearth.

  ‘You won’t have to wait long,’ the guard said. He retreated back the way we’d come and closed the door behind him. I listened out to hear it lock but there was no sound. It didn’t matter. I was far beyond running now. I shuffled over and crouched at the fire. I wanted to hold my hands out in front and warm them but they were still tied behind my back and so I had to make do with basking in the glow like a grass snake on a rock. I’d been crouching there some time, taking a perverse delight in the way the heat made my body prickle, when I heard the door open. I didn’t bother to stand. I didn’t even look. I assumed it would be Fairfax, come to send me on my way.

  ‘That’s the way, Falkland,’ came a voice I found all too familiar. ‘Defiant to the end. If the King himself were to lead you to the top of a cliff and then demand that you didn’t jump off, you’d throw yourself straight onto the rocks below, wouldn’t you?’

  I turned.

  Cromwell had been different in London. Here he was dressed every inch the soldier: a madder red coat with white stylings, leather gauntlets and thick woollen trousers over which armoured tassets were fixed in place as if we were about to fight a battle.

  ‘You might act more pleased to see me, Falkland.’ He pulled out a dagger. ‘If I may?’

  I nodded and turned my back to him. I didn’t flinch as he marched at me and brought the dagger down between my wrists, severing the twine. I brought my hands to the front of my body and massaged them in the fiery glow.

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘When you sent me here – how much did you know?’

  Cromwell raised an eyebrow. I knew he was toying with me as a cruel teacher toys with the stupidest boy in his school. I no longer cared.

  ‘I know you didn’t send me here because of the suicides. How could a man like you – even one who writes so many let
ters of condolence – care about a couple of dead cowards? You sent me because you knew. Didn’t you? Why are you even here? Why not simply let Fairfax hang me?’ I asked. ‘I’ve played my part. He’ll never bring Hopkins and all his endless Hells now; and there, I think, it could have ended. That’s what I would have done.’

  ‘Really?’ Cromwell looked at me hard. I hated the way the smile spread across his face. ‘Whereas I would think that a man with any sense to him wouldn’t let an asset like William Falkland down so easily. So here I am, not here for you perhaps, but here because of you. Black Tom wouldn’t have hanged you anyway. You’ve earned his respect, though not in a way that will ever have him call you his friend. But he has his honour, Falkland, whatever you might think of him. More so than your King.’

  ‘Miss Cain,’ I began, voice trembling. ‘What did you do to Miss Cain?’

  ‘She has a position in London now.’

  ‘And me?’ I hardly dared to ask.

  Cromwell came forward, extended his arm and wrapped his long-fingered hand around my own. My fingers felt brittle and cold in his clasp and the gesture felt awkwardly uncomfortable. I could not say which of us liked it least, yet he didn’t quickly let go. ‘Might I beg another moment of your time, Falkland?’

  I tried to tease my hand away but he was holding me fast. I was too weak.

  ‘We are about to embark on life in a very new world,’ he said. ‘The New Model will live on regardless of kings and ministers. There can be no disbanding any more. The army itself simply wouldn’t allow it.’