The Royalist

by S.J. Deas

Genres: Action & Adventure; Historical Mysteries

Synopsis

William Falkland is a dead man. A Royalist dragoon who fought against Parliament, he is currently awaiting execution at Newgate prison. Yet when he is led away from Newgate with a sack over his head, it is not the gallows to which they take him, but to Oliver Cromwell himself. Cromwell has heard of Falkland's reputation as an investigator and now more than ever he needs a man of conscience. His New Model Army are wintering in Devon but mysterious deaths are sweeping the camp and, in return for his freedom, Falkland is despatched to uncover the truth. With few friends and a slew of enemies, Falkland soon learns there is a dark demon at work, one who won't go down without a fight. But how can he protect the troops from such a monster and, more importantly, will he be able to protect himself?

Release date: September 25, 2014

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 320

Sample

CHAPTER 1

Three 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. Yes, three times they tried to kill me.

Third time lucky.

I strained to see. There was no window in the cell but somewhere there was candlelight and it was enough to show that I was alone now. There had been three others in here with me when I closed my eyes but it was no surprise they were gone. They were Irishmen, all three, and I found out long ago what they do to Irishmen here. Sooner or later the same was coming for me. I found myself bewildered that I’d slept through it but felt little else save to be all the more sickened at how far I’d fallen. I’d listened to those men cry and talk of the homes, the families they’d left behind, lovers and wives and sisters and sons. Now they were gone and I couldn’t even remember their names. That’s what they bring you to in a place like this.

I rolled onto my side and sat cross-legged in the gloom, picking tacky damp stalks of straw from the rags that were left of my clothes. I had no doubt that I stank. The cells festered with sweat and filth and urine but I’d been here so long that I didn’t notice any more. I thought of my wife, my beautiful Caro, of the scent of her hair when she stood close with her head pressed to my chest. I waited for the shudder of loss and longing to come but it didn’t. I was nothing now but numb.

I didn’t suppose it mattered. I wasn’t getting out of there alive and all those promises I’d made to the three Irishmen, to take away messages for wives and brothers and sons, well, we’d all known they were empty words. Sometimes you say what you’ve got to say and even if the other man knows it’s a lie, he’s still glad to hear it. Sometimes, flying in the face of everything around us, we choose a sliver of hope. I was never good at that.

I don’t know how long I sat there. I didn’t draw myself up when I heard footsteps. If they came for me today then I wouldn’t sob or scream or rain a thousand curses on their heads like some I’ve known, but I wouldn’t stand up for them either. It’s come to be that that’s what they expect, that we stand for them. They’d have us doff our hats as they led us to the gallows, if hats we had.

My jailer appeared as a darker silhouette against the deep gloom of the distant candlelight. He jangled his keys. He wasn’t the man I knew when they first brought me here – that man was long gone, probably to the same war that had kept me from home for five long years. The soldier who appeared before me instead was scarcely more than a boy, no older than the son I was certain I’d never see again. He fumbled a jangling ring of keys until he found the one to fit my lock. A faint smell of gunpowder reached across the air between us, sharp and sulphurous. A thought flashed across the backs of my eyes: that I was still strong enough to run this boy down. The gate to my cell squealed back but I didn’t move. It wouldn’t serve any purpose. It just felt good that that part of me hadn’t withered away, no matter how long they’d kept me alone in the dark.

‘Falkland,’ the boy said. His voice had barely broken.

I looked up. Nothing more.

‘You’re to come with me.’

So there it was. My time. When the boy decided I wouldn’t thrash about and grapple him, he strode in – purposefully, as he must have been taught – and fiddled with keys again. He left my ankles and wrists manacled but unlocked me from the grille and bade me stand. I stayed sat where I was just long enough to make him think he might have to call for his masters and then did as he asked. I had no interest in causing trouble. He was just a boy. Nothing I did was going to change things now. I’d be dead within the hour and in a way it would be a relief. It’s a bitter war whose purpose is lost to those who fight it. It has a will of its own, I think. It grinds men to husks and those are the lucky ones.

I walked with the boy behind me along rows of cells just like mine. Some were open-faced with grilles and I could see the men lying in scarred heaps inside. I’d shared conversations with some of these fellows though most were too deranged to remember. I tried not to look but I couldn’t stop my eyes from being drawn. One man lay stretched across the cold stones in a horrible paroxysm of grief. He dead-eyed me, his tongue lolling out. I saw another man lay underneath him, already dead.

Somebody shrieked from the cell opposite, startling us both. I looked round. Chains rattled against bars. Even if I didn’t hear a word, I knew the other prisoners were singing me on my way. There was only one exit to a place like this.

We reached the end of the row of cells and climbed a stone stairway to the next. The steps were old, chipped and uneven, thinly coated in a wet slime of mud and dung, trampled back and forth by the boots of our jailers. A fresh reek of rot and offal rose from them, climbing through the stink of the prison. Even when we came to a passage where cold daylight streamed in to dazzle me, it still felt as if we were six feet underground. The air remained stagnant and rank. I began to think this wasn’t Newgate at all as some of my fellow prisoners had said. Perhaps we weren’t even in London.

We came to a gate where two turnkeys sat. The boy instructed me to stop. ‘I’m sorry, Falkland,’ he said.

‘Nothing to be sorry for, son. It’s not you who’ll pull the lever.’

He paused as if he didn’t understand.

‘I have to, sir . . .’

Sir? I must have misheard. He probably meant cur.

The boy produced a hood stitched out of an old grain sack from a loop on his belt. The sight of it killed any last flickering thoughts I might have had of some miraculous escape. That hood and I had become friends these last long months. I’d been wearing it when they brought me in here and now I’d wear it on my way out too. I managed a smirk. It was the sort of neat pattern by which I once wanted to live my life.

‘Do what you’ve got to do, boy. But I’d rather look my hangman in the eye. That’s a mercy the King used to grant every man he condemned, no matter what he’d done.’

The boy mumbled something I didn’t hear and dropped the hood over my eyes. It tightened with a drawstring around my neck. I heard the gate lift and we were on our way again. It was difficult enough to move with my ankles still shackled, so the hood didn’t make much difference. I felt daylight strike me for the first time in months and, even under the grain sack, it was brighter than any light I’d ever seen in my cell. I knew it was beautiful, as was the wind that touched my skin, the air bitter cold. In my cell I’d judged the month to be November: now I wasn’t so sure. This felt more of a January or February chill. However we tried, we all lost track of time in the relentless gloom.

I stepped where I was told. I slowed when I was told and stopped when I was told so that gates might be opened and steps pointed out. The boy tugged me along like a dog on a leash. I didn’t resist. Wherever we were, the day was eerily silent. I’ve seen more than my fair share of public executions and never felt one as miserable and unwatched as this. I began to climb what I supposed must be the gallows steps and didn’t hear a single scream, a single cry, the smashing of a single stone thrown by some onlooker in the crowd. Underneath the hood I started to smile. I couldn’t suppress it. Had it finally come to this, then? Not even the commonfolk could bear it any more? Usually they turn out for any spectacle at all, no matter how grisly, but today the will of the people was being heard and it sounded like nothing I’d ever known: it sounded like silence. Had they had enough at last? Was it coming to an end? I’d heard as much but prison rumours are wild things, whole stories grown from a single misheard word.

‘Watch your head, Falkland.’

The boy pressed his palm on the top of my head and bade me stoop down low. I supposed they were fitting me for the rope and I was pleased to find that I wasn’t afraid. I was ready for this, as ready as I could be, even as the last regrets and a final memory of my Caroline filled me. A hand pushed me forward. I stumbled and almost fell as the boy pushed me down into a rough wooden seat. I felt him withdraw and heard a door shut close by. A horse whinnied.

Wait. What? This was no scaffold and gallows – was I in a carriage now?

At once my calm was gone and a fear took me in its place. I whipped my head left and then right. I’d been ready to hang, ready to die, but not ready for this. I felt certain that I was not alone, too, but I would have known it if the boy had climbed aboard behind me. Someone was already here then. I tried to lift my hands but now the boy had locked them down. A horrible panic churned deep inside me. I heard a heavy breath and then a stench crept into the air inside my hood, the like of which I’ve only known from men on starvation rations whose very bodies have started to eat themselves. The sickly smell came through the grain bag hood and wrapped itself around me. I had no choice but to breathe it in.

‘Sit still, Falkland.’ I didn’t know the voice. It sounded deep and musical: a thespian or a minstrel, some courtly fool too cowardly ever to fight. I imagined it might belong to a jester, except the Puritan men who held me would never entertain such a thing.

‘Who are you?’ I knew then how afraid I was from how desperate I was to know. A condemned man can come to peace with his fate; but a man who doesn’t know it might kill himself with worry.

‘You might count yourself fortunate, Falkland, that you’re even here to ask that question.’

‘You didn’t answer.’

‘It matters little,’ the syrupy voice returned. ‘I’m an escort. Nothing more.’

‘Escorting me where? I was supposed to die today.’

‘Were you?’ This must have amused the man for he let out a little chortle. ‘You were supposed to die every day for the last month. Fortune smiles on you, Falkland. When we heard who you were, we were intrigued.’

Who I was? I was nobody. I wasn’t even a commander. A mistake, then, but now some intelligencer wanted to ask his questions before they hanged me, was that it? Damn it but I wasn’t even with the King, not really, not through anything other than blasted chance. Hundreds and hundreds of men out there were dying for their ideals but there were thousands more like me, dying just for the sake of dying. I was tired of this war long before it even began. I just wished they’d hurry up and get on with it – let me die for somebody else’s crusade and then let me rot in peace.

I sat in silence. The other man didn’t make a sound but sometimes you can hear a smirk.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked. I knew my questions must be futile but I felt compelled to break the silence. At least, for a few seconds, it saved me from breathing his hideous breath.

‘Settle down, Falkland. You’ll find out soon enough.’

The carriage rattled on. I had no idea where we were going but I knew we hadn’t left the city. The air was fresher than I remembered of London from five years before, but that was only because the King held Newcastle and so there wasn’t any coal. People would freeze on the streets this winter. All the same, I could hear the city sounds and smell the city smells. I fancied we’d come to the river and were following its banks because we stopped threading through narrow streets and I could hear seagulls. Their screeching reminded me of home, of those Cornish beaches where the waves would thunder and crash, and I felt a horrible flurry of joy – horrible because I’d abandoned both hope and joy long ago. To know it could reappear so suddenly, so violently, felt like a betrayal.

I heard bells then, and not the plaintive pealing of bells from a country church – I’ve heard that sound too often, as if the church towers themselves are crying out against the marauders ripping out their altars and setting fire to every icon. No, these bells were more powerful, more strident and they were getting nearer. They were the bells of Parliament, of St Stephen’s Chapel.

I heard the man beside me shuffle. He must have known, now, that I had guessed.

‘Why?’ I asked him.

‘Your questions will be answered, Falkland.’

‘You’ll answer them now!’ I was so desperate to understand why they’d bring me all this way, and for what purpose, that against my own will I lashed out, but the chains only snapped me back with a jolt that shuddered right through me. Bones jarred and old wounds started to shriek. My heart pounded in my breast.

‘You exert yourself too much for a man who’s been shackled to a rail for four months.’ There was a sneering disdain to the voice.

‘Four months? Is that all it’s been?’ Four months. Barely November. I wasn’t as wrong as I’d first thought, though the chill of the air remained as of the very depths of winter.

The carriage slowed to a halt. I felt it turn and cut a tight circle. The horses whinnied and then we were still. The man beside me stood and bustled past, dropping out of the door on my right. ‘It feels longer, doesn’t it, Falkland?’

He sounded contrite, as if he too had suffered similar deprivations. Hatred would have angered me less. I wasn’t expecting him to feel anything for me at all. ‘You have the wrong man,’ I told him, though I knew I was wasting my breath. His hand grappled with mine and in that way he steered me to the ground. Somewhere above us the pealing of the bells went on. It was, I had counted, noon. In my cell I had made it midnight.

‘It’s almost over, Falkland.’

There was a terrible irony in that. I had thought it almost over from the very beginning.



CHAPTER 2

When the hood came off my head I kept my eyes tightly closed. Even then I could still see pillars of light that might have blinded me; but as I slowly squinted out at the world I saw they were only tall, narrow windows throwing columns of winter sunlight up the stone walls, not the fierce torches my inquisitors had once held perilously close to my face. I was in a stone chamber – but apart from the ornate windows and a candelabrum it was as bare as a cavern with only a fireplace and bookshelves to break up the walls.

I heard the footsteps of my syrupy escort patter away behind me. I turned to look but all I saw was the shape of him vanishing through an arch as a door closed behind him. My eyes slowly took a grip on their situation and adjusted to the glare from the windows. I realised the chamber was bigger than I’d first thought, and long. At the end of it a man in black robes sat behind a broad, bare desk. The light gradually faded to the edges of my vision and I saw that on one side of the desk were piles of parchment and on the other a Bible and an ink pot. The man didn’t look up and I began to wonder if he even knew I was there. He was sitting in a tall wooden chair – perhaps in other circumstances, if it had only been decorated thus, I might have called it a throne – and rhythmically lifting the pieces of parchment from one pile, signing his name at the bottom and then placing them in another. He worked with a fierce and studious concentration. Even when I jangled my chains he didn’t look up.

‘I shall be with you shortly,’ he said. He had a deep baritone voice but seemed to be sick; he spoke from the back of his throat, or through his nose. I tried to reason out my circumstances. I’d thought, when they took me from Newgate, that it was to beat information from me – information I’d gladly have given away if I’d had it. I’d not been much looking forward to that, but if they’d brought me here for such purposes then shouldn’t there be a guard? I stared at the man behind the desk. He didn’t strike me as a torturer.

Abruptly he finished signing his papers. He looked up and we met eye to eye at last. He was about my age, past his fortieth year and perhaps a touch older. He had a big hawk’s nose and matching chin; and while I have long lost my hair, his hung wild around his shoulders, though it was not as deep and lustrous as he probably thought. He wore a stiff white collar and a black coat. He had no rings on his fingers, no chain round his neck, and rather gave the impression of a scarecrow.

‘Letters of condolence, you understand,’ he said. ‘For boys we’ve lost. Their fathers deserve that.’

I wondered if there was anybody doing that on our side. It didn’t seem the sort of thing to preoccupy the King, but if there was some loyal minister sending out letters then perhaps one had already been sent for me. It had been years since I last lay with my wife or saw our children, many months since I had last had a chance to write and more than twelve since I had heard any manner of word at all; now the idea that they might have received such a letter haunted me. Perhaps they thought me dead. For my own part, and in spite of everything I’d seen, I couldn’t begin to imagine them other than as I remembered them, bright and full of life.

‘Come forward,’ the man said.

There was still a distance between me and the desk where he sat. I shuffled forward in the tiny baby steps that my shackles would allow.

‘I had thought,’ he began, ‘you would look different.’

My eyes flickered but I didn’t reply.

‘I had thought,’ he went on, ‘that you would cut a more dashing figure. Preen about your appearance a little more, like the rest of you cavaliers.’

Most of us hated it when they called us that. You could tell which of the King’s men you wanted to fight alongside by whether or not they enjoyed the name. You were best to stay away from any man who styled himself a cavalier and didn’t look on it as an insult: they were the ones who spent their time peering into a looking glass instead of training with swords or priming their muskets. I’d seen friends die because cavaliers weren’t watching their backs.

‘You know who I am?’

I thought by now that I did but I didn’t deign to say it.

‘Because I know who you are.’

‘Perhaps, sir, you might condescend to tell me. I seem to have lost myself these last years. I don’t know if I’ve come out of that hole the same man I went in.’

‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘How droll. I heard you were reputed for it – your sense of humour. But you’d have found precious little to laugh at if I hadn’t got word we were holding you. They’d have strung you up like every other traitor.’ He stood and came around his desk and then perched on the edge of it like a coquettish maid in a drinking room. ‘It’s over, you understand.’

‘What is?’

‘The war. By the time spring comes your King will make terms.’

‘Good.’ I could see it was possible. It was the deep of winter in 1645 and we’d been at this endless back and forth for years. In all of that time I couldn’t tell you what grounds had been won or lost or won again. It was an endless game of catch-me-if-you-can – but even children at play have better tactics for this than we did. It seemed to me sometimes that the armies were like two blind men with clubs blundering around a taproom where chance had the only say as to where and when they might meet. When they met they hit each other until one staggered away and the other couldn’t find him again. Though Parliament’s blind man had found a new and bigger club of late, and I’d heard that the King had taken a disastrous beating at Naseby. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps it really was done. For my own part I’d weep no tears whoever the victor.

‘Mr Falkland . . . William. I’ll come to the point, if I may?’

‘I was hoping you would. I have a dinner engagement.’

That at least raised his smile.

‘My name is Oliver Cromwell. Parliament has charged me with winning this conflict and that is what I intend. The King and Parliament have been at war for three years and in that time the country has been in chaos. Towns have changed hands back and forth in an ever-shifting patchwork between each side, but now we have the means to end it, to bring back peace and force the King to terms.’

He came forward and made as if he was going to hold my hands like a girl pleading with her lover. Instead he merely inspected the manacles and chain and rolled his eyes as if unsurprised. When he saw I was wearing chains around my ankles as well, he strode past me, opened the door a crack and halloed a man standing waiting in the passage. The man scuttled in and unlocked me. I felt suddenly naked. I’d been in chains since the night they rounded us up, and without them I no longer knew what to do. I found that I wanted, needed, their chains. If I hated them for anything in that moment, I hated them for that.

Cromwell whispered to a second man who hurried away and returned shortly carrying a plain wooden tray with slices of meat and a hunk of dry bread; then Cromwell poured us both beer. It was as sour as any I’ve tasted but I felt better all the same. The food settled less well. Moments after I took my first bite I felt my stomach in revolt. I’d eaten precious little while I was in my cell but it had been more than I was used to out on the march. Sometimes it seemed as if there was no food left in the country at all and what little there was we would rather burn than harvest.

Cromwell watched me carefully. ‘Tell me, Falkland,’ he said, ‘what is this war about?’

I opened my mouth to speak and then held my tongue. I realised I no longer knew and wondered if I ever had. I looked away. ‘God, I suppose,’ I muttered.

‘God? Presbyterians and Independents against the Catholics?’ Cromwell shook his head. ‘Catholicism has been outlawed for over a century. Our Church of England nurtures us now. It is far too late for a turning back of that hand. It is about how the people of England wish to be governed, no more and no less.’ He turned and faced me square. He had an odd look to him, I thought, a strange kind of almost-pride, the type I’d once had teaching my son to take his first steps. ‘What do you know about our New Model?’

So that was it. ‘Your army,’ I replied. The blind man’s new club. ‘I’ve met them once or twice.’

‘It was New Model soldiers who shattered your company.’

I didn’t doubt it. Once there were dozens of armies, local militias, and they were all stacked up against us. Then, as the last winter came to an end, came the New Model. From the rumours I’d heard since, all the Parliament soldiers were New Model now. They were fit and healthy and, more than anything else, they were paid. That was how Parliament made its soldiers fight. We were fighting for King and country, but King and country don’t fill your stomach at night or stitch you up when a sabre cuts you apart. Money does that. I had heard of prisoners choosing defection rather than torture or execution. I’d never asked myself what I would do if posed the same question but that, I supposed, was for the best. Perhaps I was about to find out.

‘I spent last winter in Oxford. After Newbury I was hurt. You might say mortally. I took musket fire to the leg and it turned gangrenous. They said I was going to die. I was at peace with that. Then I came out of it. They said it was God who spared me, to fight the good fight. But I knew different. Maggots got into the wound and ate the putrefied flesh. That’s what stopped the infections. Our God –’ I said it pointedly, for I was certain we shared the same Father – ‘did not save me, but the maggots came through.’

If Cromwell felt anything at this he didn’t let it show. I scarcely believed that men like him were interested in God. What they were really interested in was power. Even their brutes who tore around the countryside burning altars and stringing up simple folk who just wanted to pray, even they must have known it wasn’t done for the simple purity of our faith. When you’ve seen such acts as closely and as many times as I have, you come to understand it isn’t about religion at all; it’s about children fighting: which boy is bigger, which . . .