“Don’t be so daft. O’ course yer can. Look, that dayn on the left wiz Peter’s Church. Yer know that, don’t yer? And next door, even this long agoo, there’s the Black Lion.”
John peered in the same direction that the toddler was being pointed to. A little further down Marefair on their side of the street, St. Peter’s Church seemed much the way it had during John’s life, sombrely overlooking Parliamentary battle preparations with the same impartiality that it would show three centuries later as it watched the unmanned bomber plunging towards Gold Street. Next door to the church on the same side, as Phyllis had just pointed out, stood a two-storey wooden hostelry from which there hung a signboard that declared the place to be the Black Lyon Inne, although the animal depicted on the board looked more like a charred dog.
Only when John allowed his eyes to wander past the tavern, down the slope on which it stood and on towards the town’s west bridge, was he presented with a view markedly different from the same scene in the twentieth century. The bridge itself, a wooden structure as opposed to the stone hump that would come later, had been pulled down and rebuilt a year or two ago on Cromwell’s orders. It was now a massive drawbridge that had iron chains and winding mechanisms so that it could be pulled up if Royalists should attempt to cross the Nene. As the three young spooks stood and watched, a heavy-laden wagon creaked across its timbers and rolled on towards what looked to be a mill in the southwest while all the day bled from the sky above. As odd as this fortification seemed to modern eyes, however, it was instantly forgotten as the ghost-kids’ gaze crept further right, until they overlooked the site on which the railway station would one day be raised. Both John and Phyllis were familiar with the spectacle, but Michael Warren gasped aloud.
“What wiz it? It black-blocks the sky out so I can’t see the Victorious Park.”
Phyll laughed and shook her head, so that the after-image of her swinging bangs transformed it briefly to that of a wilted dandelion.
“Victoria Park won’t be there for abayt two ’undred years, and neither will the railway station. That’s Northampton Castle, what they named the station after. Get a good look at it while yer can. It’s been ’ere since eleven-’undred, by this bridge for ’alf a thousand years, and in another sixteen it’ll be knocked down.”
John nodded gravely as he took in the enormity of the dark pile before him, the oppressive bulk of its square towers, the corrugated and judgemental brow of its long, frowning battlements against the silver-lode of the horizon. Sprawling and immense, the brooding structure was encircled by the black scar of a moat, and on the plunging trench’s far edge sputtering firebrands that appeared to be as tall as John himself were set to either side of the great gateway, a stone mouth with its portcullis teeth bared, clenched in agony or rage. A curdling mix of light and smoke dribbled up from the torches across high, rough walls where archery-slits squinted out untrustingly into a gathering dusk.
Upon the open land around the edifice’s south side, at the margins of the dirt road that continued Gold Street and Marefair’s line west past the converted bridge, a hundred or so men of the New Model Army were erecting ragged tents on the parched summer grass. Retrieving deadwood and dry bracken from the copses in Foot Meadow just across the river, the bedraggled troops were lighting campfires, chalk-white smudges flaring here and there about the castle’s twilight flank, islands of faint cheer floated on an ocean of approaching night. Despite the muffle of the ghost-seam, on a frail westerly breeze John heard guffaws and curses, a lone fiddle tuning up, the firewood’s damp spit or the crack of an exploding knot. Horses were whinnying their anxious lullabies, silenced and hidden by the campfires’ drifting smould
er when the wind changed, just as it was changing through the length and breadth of England on this fraught and dangerous night.
Whispering as though awe-struck by the vista, or as though he thought that the foot soldiers shambling past along Marefair could hear him, Michael Warren looked from John to Phyllis as he spoke.
“Why dig they knock it drown?”
John grimaced.
“Well, you see, the battle out at Naseby that they’re going to fight tomorrow morning, Cromwell and the Parliamentary army win the day. The Civil War limps on for several months, but after Naseby there wiz no chance of the Royalists coming out on top. Once Parliament has won, Cromwell starts calling all the shots. Within four years, in 1649, he’ll have King Charles the First beheaded and turn England into a Republic that will last until his death in 1658. His son Richard succeeds him, but he abdicates within the year. By 1660, you’ll have Charles the Second made king and the monarchy restored. This new King Charles will hate Northampton, so as soon as he’s had everybody who conspired in his dad’s downfall executed, he’ll demand Northampton Castle be demolished.”
Michael looked perplexed.
“Why wizzle he do that?”
Here Phyllis chimed in from where she was crouching on the toddler’s other side.
“Just take a gander at that bloody drawbridge there, yer’ll ’ave yer answer. This place wiz a Parliamentary strong’old in the Civil War, and we backed Cromwell all the way. I ’spect that Charles the Second blamed us for the way that we’d ’elped get ’is father’s ’ead chopped orf, especially wi’ Naseby bein’ in this county. Come the restoration o’ the monarchy and we wiz on the ayts with England, good an’ proper.”
John considered this, glancing behind them back up Marefair. Reggie, Bill and Marjorie were still creating pygmy dust-storms, to the consternation of the passers-by in these times where each natural phenomenon was looked on as an omen of unrest, as if omens were needed. Satisfied that their gang-mates weren’t causing too much mischief, John turned his attention back to Phyllis and the infant.
“To be fair, Phyll, we were in this country’s bad books long before the Restoration. We’ve been seen as troublemakers here for centuries, at least since all the rebel students during the twelve-hundreds who provoked Henry the Third to sack the place. Then from the thirteen-hundreds we had Lollards here, more or less preaching that ideas of sin were all made up by clergymen for keeping down the poor. During the Civil War this wiz a hotbed of extremists, Muggletonians, Moravians, Fifth Monarchists, Ranters and Quakers – and these weren’t the Quakers who are pacifists and own all of the chocolate companies. These were fanatics calling for the overthrow of worldly kingdoms in God’s name.
“And all these sects, although they had big differences, they all made much of how Jesus had been a carpenter and all of his apostles lowly working men. The way they saw it, Christianity wiz a religion of the poor and the downtrodden, and it promised that one day the rich and godless would be done away with. Ever since the early sixteen-hundreds, when the gentry were permitted to enclose what had been common land, the rich folk had been doing well, the ‘middling sort’ like Cromwell had been struggling to keep afloat, and the poor people had been starving. It wiz during these times that you first heard everybody saying how the rich got richer and the poor got poorer, and there wiz more people being turned to beggars every day. Around the century’s mid-years, like we’re in now, there would be tens of thousands of what they called masterless men roaming round the country, vagabonds and tinkers answering to no one. All it took wiz a bright spark like Cromwell to work out how all these angry paupers could be put to use.”
John gestured to the scores of Roundhead soldiers who were trudging along Marefair, or sat baking spuds around their campfires on the grounds beside the hulking castle.
“I suppose one of the reasons why Northampton took to Cromwell wiz that the poor people here wiz as rebellious as you could find just about anywhere in England. This had been the first place to protest the land enclosures, with an uprising led by a chap called Captain Pouch. The uprising wiz quashed, of course, and Pouch wiz chopped to bits, but the resentments that would lead to civil war in fifty years wiz nowhere stronger than here in the Midlands. Now, I dare say a good many round here played along with Cromwell because they were frightened of him, but I bet there were a lot more who’d been praying for someone like him to come along. In 1643 there was a feller from Northamptonshire who’d said ‘I hope within this year to see never a gentleman in England’. Around here we thought of Cromwell as, quite literally, a Godsend. It’s no wonder that we got the job of kitting out his army with thousands of pairs of boots.”
Here Michael Warren put in his two-penn’orth, just to show that he’d been following the conversation.
“Why wiz we so poor, then, if the people who made shoes had all that work?”
John was about to answer this surprisingly sharp question when a cackling Phyllis Painter beat him to it.
“Ha! That’s because bloody Cromwell never paid us for the bloody boots! Once we’d ’elped get ’im into power ’e turned on us same as ’e turned on everybody else who’d been ’is mate when times were rough, the miserable old bugger. While we’re on the subject, d’yer reckon ’e’ll ’ave finished writin’ to ’is missus yet? It don’t look like there’ll be a lot more gooin’ on ayt ’ere, other than soldiers getting’ sloshed and chasin’ after ’ores. We should look in upon old Ironsides before we move on.”
John nodded, glancing back along Marefair through a descended gloaming that still clinked with reins and scabbards, the gloom punctuated here and there by a dull pewter gleam from peaked round helmet or iron musket-barrel. On the dusty boards outside Hazelrigg House, Bill had enlisted Marjorie and Reggie’s help in manufacturing an even bigger whirlwind than their previous attempts. The three of them were racing furiously in a solid ring of after-images around the knees of an unlucky and astonished broadsheet-seller. Wailing in confusion and religious terror, the poor fellow couldn’t see the children and was only conscious of the sudden wind from nowhere, tearing pamphlets from his grasp and spinning them into the dark above him like outsized confetti. John was chuckling despite himself as he replied to Phyllis.
“Yeah, I reckon that you’re right. We can leave your Bill and the others to their monkey business, since they look as if they’re having fun.”
Each taking one of Michael Warren’s hands, Phyll and John led the foundling back towards Hazelrigg House amidst a fluttering rain of the dismayed street-vendor’s tumbling tracts. Scanning a folded sheet already fallen to the floor, John noted that it was entitled Prophecy of the White King and seemingly foretold a violent end for Charles the First, based on astrology and various prophecies attributed to Merlin. Given that the leaflet bore tomorrow’s date and was apparently fresh off the printing press, John smiled and gave the publisher ten out of ten for timing, even if the source of his predictions seemed a little flimsy. Out of habit, John made an attempt to kick the pamphlet to one side, feeling like a buffoon as his foot passed straight through it ineffectually and he remembered he was dead. He only hoped that Phyllis hadn’t noticed.
As luck had it, Phyllis was at that moment distracted by a rather pretty living man who was approaching the front door of Hazelrigg House just ahead of them. His long hair, girlish to John’s way of thinking, fell in curling waves around the high white collar that he wore above black armour, plated on the arms and shoulders so that it resembled a fantastic beetle carapace. A sheathed sword swung at his left hip. The gallant’s face, its plumpness offset by a well-trimmed beard and a moustache, was one that John felt he had seen before, perhaps in combat out at Naseby, though a name refused to come to him.