William Falkland 01 - The Royalist Read Online Free PDF

impervious to shots. The roundheads had named it a familiar, called it a kind of popery, a kind of witchcraft. I suppose they thought the tide had turned the day they cut that poor dog down.
    Beside the bedstead was a simple wooden chair and, draped over it, a murrey gown, breeches and a stiff woollen shirt with a tall, broad collar. Perched on top sat a black hat with a wide brim and steepled crown. There were boots as well – not new but better than the sacking bound around my feet. I supposed I should have been grateful. When I bent down I saw on the floor a bowl of water and rags. I disrobed and slowly and gently lifted away the dirt. Four months of it, and when I was done I was beginning to feel like a man again. I glanced at my feet and decided not to look too closely in order to preserve that feeling. They were falling apart in a way a soldier should never allow and I wasn’t ready to witness it yet.
    I put on the shirt, the breeches, the murrey gown, the wide-brimmed hat. The rippled reflection of myself in the window glass, I decided, didn’t really look like one of the King’s traitors, one of Parliament’s own. If I ever found them again then my own men would take me for what I was. I wondered if the same could be said for my family. I thought about them then, tried to picture them as I often had back in my cell; but now, at last, I allowed myself that luxury, that joy that I might yet see them again. I’m not ashamed that I wept. Nor that I cannot say for how long. I had held them away from myself, as far as I could, for so long.
    Caro and I were joined in July 1625. It was a swift romance and, if the story is to be told, then I must say it was Caro who did the romancing. She had, she told me later, set her eyes on me from the very first. Her father was a local lord, a man whose faith in the King was only outmatched by his faith in God, and if he was ever dismayed that his firstborn daughter fell for me, a lowly tenant farmer, he was graceful enough not to show it. He took me hunting and told me of his daughter’s intent. I did not agree immediately though it was always imagined that I would not refuse. The marriage contract was not only for a wife but for lands and titles. A position. When I shook the old man’s hand I knew my life was changing forever.
    I was a young man then and had not before considered myself the marrying type. I worked the farm and had no great desire to go beyond it. Yet Caroline Miller claimed she saw something in me that she found lacking in the nearby men of her own standing. Later she would tell me she’d seen me in church and watched me working the land. She took me for a native Cornishman but really I was an interloper, sent here by my father before he died. Caro’s own father had had bigger things planned for her – alliances, he confided in me, that might see his family rising higher in political circles, something that might even bring a grandson one day to the King’s court – but Caro was her father’s little girl and, no matter how he protested, she knew she would get what she wanted. To this day I don’t know why it was she wanted me. I’m certain it wasn’t rebellion; for Caro, no matter how obstinate, was never one for frippery and nonsense. If there was an explanation other than love then I never knew it. Nor, in truth, did I want to find it out.
    If I’d never seen myself being a husband then I’d surely never seen myself a father. As fate would have it we were married three years before we were blessed with our first child. By then Caro feared she was barren – and I dare say her father feared I was as impotent as Essex, that commander of Parliament we were one day bound to meet in battle – but, at last, we were given a son. We named him John after a brother Caro had lost. Three years later there came a daughter. We named her Charlotte; and if that was to be my life then I was happy.
    Nor had I ever thought to find myself in London, not a whit of