Everybody gaped at Marjorie, astonished less by the perceptive point she’d made than by the sheer amount of words she’d used in making it. No one had ever heard her say so much before, and nor had they suspected her of harbouring such strongly held opinions. John considered what she’d said for a few moments and concluded that the tubby little girl was more than likely right. In his own letters home, John had sometimes made light of his grim circumstances, it was true, but not to the extent that Cromwell was engaged in doing. John had never written to his mam about attending ‘some small matter’ off in Normandy, or rattled on about bake-pudden to the point where you forgot there was a war on. Cromwell’s writings were those of a normal man in normal times, and on both counts you couldn’t help but feel that this was knowing misrepresentation. Gazing at Drowned Marjorie across the chamber through the failing light, John nodded soberly.
“I think you might have something there, Marge. Anyway, it doesn’t look like he’ll be doing much in the next little while. Why don’t we go outside while it’s still light and see what’s happening?”
There was a mutter of assent. Leaving the statue-still lieutenant-general to his writings, a dark shape losing its definition in a darkening room, the children flocked out through Hazelrigg House’s thick walls of coursed rubble to the street beyond, where there was much activity. Marefair, with low but well-appointed buildings to each side of it, bustled with life in a tin sunset. The last drip of daylight glinted from the points atop iron helmets, from the bundled blades of the long pikes that an old man was just then carrying into Pike Lane for sharpening. It flashed upon the bridles of fatigued and steaming horses, sparked from the tall mullioned windows of Hazelrigg House, dotting the ghost-seam’s murk with points of brightness, dabs of white relieving thick umber impasto on the day’s completed canvas. Delicately beautiful and subtly disturbing; it was the fragile illumination just before a summer storm, or during an eclipse. Tired Roundhead soldiers slogged through the well-trodden mud of the main concourse, looking for a tavern or else stabling their bony mounts, while such few local men and women as there were about Marefair did all they could to keep out of the troopers’ way. John saw a dog kicked with a Parliamentary boot; a pock-marked youth cuffed to one side by a stout leather glove.
On every countenance, both military and civilian, was the same look of profound and paralysing dread. It only underlined Marjorie’s point about the calmness of the man who still sat writing in the room they’d just vacated, with his face like a heraldic beast and his detachment in stark contrast to the fearfulness afflicting everybody else upon this otherwise serene June evening. These were monstrous times, in which only a monster might feel comfortable. Somewhere behind John, Bill began to sing what sounded like a fragment from a catchy song, although it wasn’t one that John had ever heard before.
“… and I would rather be anywhere else than here today.”
Bill broke off with a rueful, knowing chuckle. He and Reggie Bowler wandered over to the street’s far side where they distracted themselves with the manufacture of small dust devils by racing round in circles. They weren’t doing very well until Drowned Marjorie went over to assist them, at which point they raised a whirlwind big enough to make at least one burly Roundhead step back in surprise and cross himself. Meanwhile, Phyllis and John were left in charge of Michael Warren, standing on the funny wooden duckboards outside Cromwell House. The infant turned his curly blonde head back and forth, trying to work out where he was. Finally he looked up at John and Phyllis.
“Wiz this Marefair? I can’t tell what bit of it I’m looking at.”
Phyllis took Michael’s hand — she had a way with kids, John thought, as if she might have had a couple of her own — and crouched beside the infant as she turned him round until he faced due west.
“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 smoulder when the wind changed, just as it was changing through the length and breadth of England on this fraught and dangerous night.