From his position halfway up the spiral stairs John thought that he could hear them too, but then decided that the sound was more probably that of a big cannon being wheeled along in darkness through the quagmire of Marefair outside. Considering what Cromwell had just said, John found himself reminded of the only line from John Bunyan’s The Holy War that had lodged in his memory: “Mansoul it was the very seat of war.” The words rang true, whatever sense you took them in. Northampton, in all its obscurity, was birthplace to an inexplicable amount of conflict and the point of culmination for a great deal more. Crusades, Peasant’s Revolt, War of the Roses and the Civil War, all of them had begun or ended here. If, on the other hand, you took the word ‘Mansoul’ to mean just what it said, to be the soul of man, then that too was a source of warfare, be it Cromwell’s fierce Protestant zeal or the religion to which the exploding martyr on the Mayorhold’s higher landings had belonged. Mansoul it was the very seat of war, no doubt about it. That had been the message behind every quick march and about turn in that chilly upper hall at College Street, when John was in the Boy’s Brigade.
The memorable quote caused him to spare a thought now for the other John, John Bunyan, and to idly wonder what the seventeen-year-old author-to-be was doing upon that momentous night. As a young Roundhead soldier he might be commencing a first watch there in the garrison at Newport Pagnell, where Bunyan was stationed during 1645. Perhaps he smoked a pipe there in his watch-post and gazed up at the abundant stars, trying to read in them some sign that Christ would be returning soon to overturn King Charles and all his kind, then to announce a new Jerusalem here in the English heartlands. To declare a nation of elected saints amongst which both John Bunyan and the figure sitting now across the candlelit expanse believed themselves to be included.
Breaking off from his grim reverie, Cromwell looked up at Ireton.
“Tell me, Henry, do your men find themselves billets near these parts? At first light I must hurry to inspect the ground at Naseby, and wouldst soon be in my bed.” Realising that he’d been dismissed, Ireton appeared almost relieved.
“My regiment and I have quarters but a short way off, and will be ready with the dawn. I would not keep you from your rest, yet only ask, Sir, that you should convey my most sincere endearments to your daughter.”
John belatedly recalled that Ireton had eventually become son-in-law to the other man by marrying his eldest daughter, Bridget. Cromwell chuckled almost warmly, scraping back his chair as he stood up.
“Pray do not Sir me, Henry. Sooner would I have thee call me father, for so it shall be in time. I have just now been at a writing of a letter to my home, and when I copy it in fair I shall be glad to pass to Bridget your affections. But enough of such things. Get thee to thy regiment and to thy bed, and in the morn may God be with thee.”
Stepping from behind the table, Cromwell crossed to Ireton, reaching out to shake the young man stiffly by the hand. Ireton blinked rapidly and swallowed as he answer
ed.
“And with thee, good Master Cromwell. I shall bid thee a good night.”
With that the interview appeared to be concluded. Cromwell opened the front door for Ireton, who stepped back into the darkness of Marefair and was immediately gone from sight. His guest having departed, the lieutenant-general sighed and walked towards the spiral staircase in the corner, picking up the flickering candelabra on his way. Kicking unwittingly through the three ghost-kids that were sitting there, he mounted the steps wearily, presumably towards his bedroom on the building’s upper floor. Exchanging glances, Phyll and John drifted like vapour up the stairway after him, towing the tiny shade of Michael Warren in between them. Clearly, both of them were eager to learn how the future regicide and Lord Protector slept upon the eve of his most famous battle.
John, though, was still thinking about Henry Ireton. Although he was fated to receive a pike-wound and be captured by the Royalists tomorrow morning, Ireton’s captors would release him in the later stages of the battle, fearing for their own lives as the Parliamentary forces moved in for the kill. He would go on to marry Bridget Williams-alias-Cromwell, shackling himself inseparably to the Cromwell family and their fortunes for the rest of his short life. By 1651 Ireton would be stationed in Ireland trying to end the Catholic rebellion by laying siege to Limerick, a rebel stronghold, where he would succumb to plague. His death, however, would not spare him Royal retribution nine years later when King Charles the Second was restored as monarch. Shortly before pulling down Northampton Castle the new king would have the bodies of both Ireton and his father-in-law dug from their Westminster Abbey tombs and dragged through London’s streets to Tyburn, where the pair would be somewhat unnecessarily hung, drawn and quartered. As with many wars, holy or otherwise, in John’s opinion neither side had much to recommend them when it came to manners.
Phyllis, John and Michael were now on the upstairs landing at Hazelrigg House, pursuing Cromwell as he slouched with candelabra in one hand towards his bedchamber. The hulking hunchbacked shadow that crept after him reminded John of the frontispiece illustration in his childhood copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress. It had been a funny-looking picture, not at all realistic in the style that John preferred although if he remembered rightly it had been a painting done by William Blake, who was quite famous and respected even though to John’s eye he drew like a baby. The wash reproduction had shown Bunyan’s Christian with his weighty moral burden strapped onto his back, bent double over the beloved book that he was reading as he trudged along. This was the shape that sidled after Cromwell now along the landing, a devout giant trailing in the future Lord Protector’s wake much as the massed horde of poor, godly English people did. Or, it occurred to John, was that pious and down-at-heel shadow-colossus driving Cromwell on before it and not following him after all? Whose will was truly being done in England during this tumultuous and bloody decade? Who was using who?
Cromwell turned from the passageway and through the open door of a room on the children’s right, closing it after him. Following his example John and Phyllis poured into the portal’s timbers in pursuit, with Michael Warren dragged between the duo and grey chorus-lines of after-pictures shimmering behind them.
The bedchamber turned out to be overlooking Marefair through the diamond grid of the tall windows on the room’s far side. Out through the criss-crossed panes John could see pale forms fluttering through the night, strange nightingales accompanied by streams of stop-motion photography and ringing peals of mirth. Only when he’d observed that one of the unusually aerobatic creatures wore a pair of National Health glasses did John realise that Reggie, Marjorie and Bill had got fed up of raising dust-storms and had taken to the air, swooping above the street and shrieking as they played at being proper spectres of the sort you found in horror-stories. John thought that they showed a shocking lack of discipline but probably weren’t doing any harm, and so turned his attentions to the hefty wooden bed, like something from Hans Christian Andersen, which was the chamber’s centrepiece.
Cromwell sat on its edge, wearily pulling off his boots. Beside the closed door, set out on or near a wooden trunk, John noticed the black-painted armour, pretty much identical to Ireton’s, which Cromwell would wear tomorrow morning. Cromwell’s suit would do a better job protecting him than Ireton’s would, though, John reflected. Unlike Ireton with an ugly pike-wound to his shoulder, his father-in-law to be would come through Naseby and emerge unscathed, no more than winded while defeated cavaliers were being rounded up, or while Fairfax’s men were raping and disfiguring the women in a captured Royalist wagon-train. John had seen, or would see, some of that for himself after tomorrow’s battle. He remembered that it had been this climactic scene of cruelty, ears cut off and noses slit, that had forced him to tunnel back to his own time on that first visit to the battle, some while prior to meeting the Dead Dead Gang. Of the horrors John had witnessed, both in 1640s Naseby and in 1940s France, the mutilation of the Royalist women, wives and sweethearts labelled “whores and camp-sluts” of “that wicked army”, had been easily the most unbearable. For God’s sake, they were women.
Cromwell had by now removed all of his clothes, briefly exhibiting a saddle-callused arse before he pulled on the long nightgown that had been left folded up on his top blanket. Kneeling, the lieutenant-general of horse pulled a stone chamber-pot from underneath the bed and piddled into it, at the same moment letting off a lengthy trombone-tuner of a fart that reduced Michael, Phyllis and eventually even John to helpless laughter. When he’d finished urinating and returned the heavy Jeremiah to its hiding place in the below-bed shadows, Cromwell remained kneeling with hands pressed together and eyes closed as he recited the Lord’s Prayer. With this completed, he stood up and pinched off the three flames that flickered from his candelabra where it rested upon a plain chest-of-drawers beside the window. In the darkness outside the three corresponding starbursts of reflected brightness winked out one by one, leaving the night to Reggie, Bill and Marjorie whom John could still hear giggling as they sailed through the black heavens over Marefair. Grunting as though with discomfort from stiff joints, Cromwell walked back across the room and climbed beneath the bedclothes. After a surprisingly few moments’ grumbling and turning he appeared to fall asleep, apparently not troubled in the least by all the slaughter that awaited him come daybreak.
“Well. I ’spect that’s that, then.”
Phyllis sounded disappointed, and John was forced to admit that he felt the same way. He felt let down, although he didn’t know what he had been expecting. Doubts and tears, perhaps, or evil gloating like a fiend from the Saturday morning pictures down the Gaumont; manic cackling to scare the nippers at the flicks, the tuppenny rush?
As Cromwell snored contentedly, John drifted over to the window so that he could see what capers their three gang-mates had been getting up to. Squinting upwards through the lead-striped glass he saw them swinging back and forth on the night breezes high above the street. They’d evidently startled pigeons from their roosts in Marefair’s eaves and were now chasing the bewildered fowl against a cream three-quarter moon and its corona, cast upon the summer haze. John called Phyllis and Michael over from where they were standing by the bed, amusing themselves by inserting ghostly fingers into the black, gaping nostrils of its sleeping occupant.
“Here, leave his nose alone and come and see what your kid and the other silly beggars have been doing while we’ve been in here.”
The ghost-gang’s leader and her little charge did as John had suggested. Soon they stood beside him, pointing upwards through the patterned panes and making comments in alternate glee and disapproval as their wayward colleagues herded baffled birds amongst the moonbeams, far above Northampton. Entertaining themselves in this fashion, the three children were engrossed to the extent that for a moment they forgot completely where they were. The deep voice sounding from the dark behind them, then, came as that much more of a shock.
“Who are you, and what is your business?
”
Michael screamed and grabbed John’s hand. The phantom children wheeled about in startlement to find a sour-faced boy of something like eleven years of age standing there nude beside the bed, in which Cromwell still snored, and glowering at them through the shadows. The lad was afflicted by the most terrible haircut John had ever seen, shaved to grey stubble high up at the back, the bristles ending where a basin cut began. The boy’s dark hair looked like a toadstool with his spotty, luminously pallid face and neck providing the black deathcap with its soapy and translucent stem. John’s mind raced as he tried to work out just what they were seeing, and a sidelong glance at Phyll confirmed that she was in the same boat. Michael simply stood there, lids peeled back as if attempting to expel both eyeballs from their sockets by sheer force of will.
“I ask again your business in my farmer’s house. Be quick to tell me, and not in a frightful way!”
It was a man’s voice, John thought, coming from a boy barely in puberty to judge from the one isolated hair on a pudenda otherwise entirely bare. Something about the way the figure framed its sentences, the way that it said “farmer’s house” but sounded as if it meant “father’s house”, suggested someone newly dead who hadn’t found their Lucy-lips yet. On the other hand, the nervous movements that the lad made weren’t attended by the usual visual echoes, which suggested that he was alive. On yet a third hand, he could see them, when in normal circumstances he would not be able to unless he was deceased.
Or dreaming.
Everything fell into place. John placed the adult tones at the same moment that he noticed the beginnings of a wart between the boy’s chin and his lower lip. Turning towards the still-bewildered Phyllis, John permitted himself a smug chuckle.
“It’s all right. I’ve worked out who it wiz.”