William Falkland 01 - The Royalist Read Online Free PDF Page B

intent to accompany Caro’s father into this seditious world of kings and parliaments. But the things you do for love are many and oftentimes unexpected. Caro earnestly desired that I stand alongside her father. So when her father came to London in service of the King, I was at his side. And when the King marshalled an army to go north in the winter of 1639 to meet the treasonous Scots, I too was part of that army. For her. For love.
    In that room looking out over the frozen Thames, six years later, when the tears would not go away, I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes, willing sleep to come and rescue me for a few brief hours. How I wished I’d stayed on the farm and not become part of this wretched war.
    Warbeck returned in the morning and took me to a kitchen on the other side of the Inns. England was starving but it seemed London was not. It was, though, bitterly cold and they were burning wood in the range. I noticed trees being felled in the courts and a small part of me took pleasure in that. It meant, against all their proud declarations, that Cromwell and his crowd had not returned coal to their capital. Newcastle was still with the King or else under the fist of the dreaded Scots.
    Warbeck fed me a breakfast of pottage and cider and we were on our way, yet it seemed to me that our carriage took us further into the city and not away towards the West Country. My suspicion was proved well founded when we stopped and Warbeck snarled at me to get out. We were close to a wooden bridge over a small river that I thought must be the Fleet. The street ran close beside it and an inn stood nearby, though Warbeck paid it no attention. A little way further the cobbles were bridged by a stone arch whose purpose seemed obscure. Warbeck pointed and I saw his meaning. At the far end of the street stood a scaffold and gallows and the sight of them conjured a dagger of fear that struck hard and deep. Yesterday I’d come from my cell ready to die. But much had happened. I’d allowed myself to have hope again.
    ‘Take a good long look, Falkland,’ hissed Warbeck. ‘Keep this sight in your mind. Stray a foot out of place and that’s what awaits you.’
    ‘It appears the same as what awaited me yesterday,’ I said with a lightness I certainly didn’t feel. Warbeck had made his point well.
    ‘Two men from this very street were found to be plotting against Parliament. They were hanged from those gallows. We find use for them often enough.’ I knew it must be true: the gallows were quiet now but surely saw frequent service, otherwise they would have been disassembled and the guardsmen who stood watch to keep them from being pilfered for firewood assigned to other duties. Warbeck turned a cold look on me and then slowly shifted his eyes to the street under my feet. ‘Fifty years ago, recusant papists were hanged and quartered on this spot.’
    If we were to be given a tour of every part of London in which murder had been dealt to those Parliament con-sidered stood against it then I doubted we’d ever reach our destination. I felt a strong desire to change the subject away from hangings; and what interested me far more was why Cromwell would employ a royalist plucked from a Newgate cell to spy on his own ally Fairfax. Perhaps his intent was honest, but as a spy was certainly how I’d be seen. ‘Have you ever met Fairfax?’ I asked.
    Warbeck favoured me with a thin smile. ‘Get in the carriage, Falkland. We have ground to cover.’
    The carriage took us out of the barren city and I had the chance to see, first hand, the excavations and fortifications we’d heard about winters before when I was billeted in Oxford with a splint upon my leg. I’ll not say they were impressive things but they were better than nothing. The commonfolk had turned out to dig ditches and build tall earthen walls, and while they wouldn’t keep Prince Rupert and the King out if they ever gathered a strong enough army, they would certainly hold back