William Falkland 01 - The Royalist Read Free

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