Traitor's Field (11 page)

In those days the old town hall in Newport was still relatively new – Newport itself was already old. The grand grey stones of the town hall squatted complacent by the square, while the smaller lesser buildings around it did their best against the autumn winds, and the rain that had not seemed to stop for a year. 

While Charles Stuart, King of England, Scotland and Ireland – though at present holding sway over no more than a relative handful of followers and servants in one suite of rooms in one building in this small town on an island in the far south of one of his kingdoms – negotiated with the representatives of his upstart Parliament, he did so alone. While he fenced with their demands for a restriction of his rights and powers, while he exercised in law and theology and philosophy and rhetoric, while he danced in languages, in Latin that tapped precisely at the panelling and French that drifted among the hanging fabrics, he was allowed no advisers with him.

In that innocent time – while autumn lasted, at least; while there were still stubborn gnarled leaves on some of the trees and green on the hills above the town – one still did not accuse a King. Even criticism was veiled. So the manifold ills and sufferings of the nation were nothing to do with the man at the heart of them – in the eye of the storm, so to speak – but instead ascribed to the evil intentions of his advisers. Wicked designs, wilful lusting for blood, Popery, even treason: any charge could be levelled at the King’s advisers with increasing freedom. The King’s advisers were the offence; they surely could not be part of its restitution. 

Besides, Parliament knew Charles Stuart for the slipperiest man in his whole realm, and a slippery man was more likely to slip if not steadied by his counsellors.

The King’s advisers were suffered to remain in an ante-room, behind a curtain. Through the heavy material they could hear the voices of debate: the high, wheeling flights of His Majesty’s arguments, his little erudite witticisms fluttering the curtain tassels, his occasional angry retorts buffeting at the folds; and the rumbling murmur of the negotiators of Parliament, implacable or entreating, frustrated or sure, and apparently endless.

The ante-room got its light from a single, tiny recessed window, and from two candelabra. Six men slumped in its gloom, rich-coated shadows, watching the candlelight flickering in each other’s eyes, the strange alien glow from the window catching a bottle of wine. Intermittently one would lean forward to catch some particular point in the muffled debate; shortly he would slouch back. The room stank of cooked meat and of men.

Furtive murmurs from their confinement:

‘His Majesty is in good fettle.’

‘His Majesty is not immune to blunders, but these London lawyers would do well to recall that they trifle with a most educated man.’

‘The most widely learned, surely.’

‘How long has it been now, today?’

‘His stutter is often much diminished now.’

‘Lord, how I loathe these cheap invocations of the people’s interest.’

‘What will it avail, this learning and debate of the King?’

‘Little village demagogues. Inns of Court mountebanks.’

‘We are advised to delay. To procrastinate. To work on the divisions of our enemies. The longer His Majesty may talk, the more time they will have to fall among themselves.’

‘Advised? Advised by whom?’

‘You have better counsel to offer us? His Majesty has other men working for his interest, and other channels of communication to London. We must play our part.’

Charles Stuart, a small man exquisitely dressed, poised but comfortable in a large and ornate oaken chair, feet perched elegantly on a stool to disguise the fact that they would not reach the ground. A magician conjuring theories from a sphere of legitimacy beyond his audience, and spinning word tricks out of his lace cuffs.

Thus Charles Stuart: 

An old Jew in Madrid showed me a clockwork bird in a cage: a golden bird, tiny and exquisite, that danced in a ring and whistled and flapped its wings, all with the turning of a key.

A shrivelled, obsequious man. But fastidious, I think, and proper in spite of his faith. In a world that despised him he had created another more perfect world, a world over which he had absolute control, a world of order and beauty, a world protected in a cage.

I find that the Lord has set me to spin in this cage.

How ugly you are. Your drab, heavy weeds and your pedantic hectoring, your uncomfortable courtesies, your common choleric English pudding-faces, your tiresome wrestling with words, your insistence on sharing my company.

I do not have to listen to these men, do I? I am not like other men. I am not made for this bullying, this forced communion with other humans, this dirtiness.

There will come a time, I think, when I must leave my perch and fly this cage.

You will prove to me? Your entire error, Master Glynn, with your books and your precepts and proposals, your vile temporizing aristocratic friends beside you, your clumsy studied indignities of confinement, your fundamental error is to believe that we dabble in a matter that is susceptible of proof. You may prove to me the earth round or flat; you may prove to me triangles and spheres. Prove to me black white, if you will. But these things of faith and Kings, these are of a different cloth altogether. These are not given to us for debate or for consideration. They do not become true because we juggle numbers and compare theories and decide them true. 

They may not be changed like an ill-fitting doublet; they may not be reformed like a wilful lad; they may not be reordered like pans on a shelf. They simply are, like the stars or the sun, like the weather, like the very earth itself, and we may merely decide how to conform ourselves to them.

And still you drone. Theorists native and foreign. Empty threats. Pathetic entreaties. A Christian instinct to conciliate; a holy compromise.

Do not you understand? I cannot trifle with these perfect glories! The throne, the religion, these were not given me for my amusement and contingent use, to be gambled with, or traded like so many tinker’s trinkets. This was my inheritance, given to me in trust for the good of all my people. The right ordering of the state is our heritage and our defence. The true religion is God’s, and God’s alone, and we must account ourselves thrice blessed to be allowed to share it. To toy with the state is treason. To toy with the religion is damnation, and for us all. While Europe has burned in a hell of intestine chaos these three decades past, we had lived at peace one with the other, tolerant of our varieties within the embrace of God. Your innovations, your experimentations, your Parliamentary meddling, would set us all adrift for eternity.

I wish my fallible voice could be trusted to impart these truths aright, that you would understand and believe.

The Bishops are the interpreters of the Lord God Himself, and I am His regent. Do not you understand that if I give up the Bishops I give up the soul of all my kingdom? The Bishops are divine. This ordering of society is divine. This ordering of society is mine!

I must not seem to weep. A Prince must have no private side for the world. Brother Henry twisting my ears until I wept. A Prince must have no emotion. The King so scornful of his pale and feeble second son, court pranks and blustering words, until the second son became his heir. Then such a pathetic race to make me fitted, the ghastly forced hours of paternal counsel, an old man desperate to mould his youth anew before death overtakes him.

What have I done wrong that I am thus tormented? The Son of God suffered for the sins of other men. Surely, this land has known every manner of sin for ten years or more. I have striven to protect my people and protect my faith, to do my duty as I saw it. In what has lain my sin, that my God should punish me thus? 

Why do these men not understand me? Is there no one in this realm who could have been my fellow?

The old manor house huddled in the foothills of the Peak District, local stone and lack of show, as if to convince the violent world of politics that it was more of the natural world than of the human, and could be left in peace. The guests, as Shay watched them from the edge of the room, were such as might be found after some great battle or calamity: battered and world-worn and dull-headed, clothes and eyes that had seen too much of life in the last ten years.

‘Shay, surely? I did not know you were living still.’

‘As you see.’ His face offered no warmth, and the forgotten acquaintance drifted away.
Perhaps none of us here is living still.

Not a forgotten acquaintance. Roger Savary: widower; East Anglia, but that would hardly be comfortable now; son killed at. . . Edgehill? Early, anyway. Now huddling here on the high ground as the flood destroyed his old world.

And then a flash of a girl across the room. There were young people here, after all. This one would be. . . not yet twenty, surely, but woman enough. The clothes were worn, but that only heightened the bright glow of her bust, thin sharp collar bone and the creamy sweep down to her breasts, dramatically pure flesh against the old linen. Behind her a man of her own age in a coat too big for him, watching her face, her open smile.

Shay felt his own chest move, the blood in him.
Yes, Roger Savary, I am living still.

‘Mortimer Shay,’ and there was genuine warmth in the voice. It was the warmth that made him turn.

‘Sarah! My lady Saville, how are you? Does me good to see you.’ And it did, rather to his surprise. Not a particular friend or a particular memory, but a link with the past who had somehow kept her vitality.

She was examining his face with interest.

‘You’re about to say that you’re surprised I’m still alive, I think. Everyone seems to find it strange.’

She smiled, then shook her head impulsively; a girl’s gesture. ‘I would never doubt that you would live.’ She smiled again, and glanced back over her shoulder. ‘Some of the young men were asking about the grim stranger standing on the edge of the room. I fired their interest with wild stories of your past.’

He grunted. Had he had her ever? Not that he could remember. There had always been prettier, wilder, more passionate women to be had, under the floating layers of dresses, behind half-closed doors, after hours.

‘I’m grateful for the invitation today.’

She shrugged. These gatherings would be happening frequently, as this ravaged society herded together for reassurance, for warmth. ‘You’ve come over from Astbury? How is the place these days?’

‘Survived well enough. First time I’ve been there for ten years or more.’

‘We were sorry to hear about George. You were kin, weren’t you?’

‘Through his brother’s wife. You saw much of him here?’

She considered it for a moment. ‘Occasionally, once the worst years of the fighting were over. It’s hardly an easy journey here, but we’ve little enough society in these parts. He was here a few times in a few years, I suppose. Recently less. He was. . .’ – she hesitated as she strayed into the world of politics and men – ‘increasingly busy, I think – in the King’s service.’

Shay murmured neutrally. He hadn’t thought to hear of George Astbury here, but would take the insights where he found them.

‘And you?’ she said. She went to touch his arm lightly, but hesitated as if suddenly aware of his sheer size, and when her fingers finally brushed his sleeve they came with more charge. ‘Your interests—’

‘My own. As always.’

She nodded, as if this had satisfied her curiosity. ‘George was last here very recently. Probably only a week or so before – before the battle.’ She tried to push the war back beyond the hills. ‘He seemed. . . rather changed.’

Shay looked round into her face. ‘Changed?’

‘He was always rather serious, wasn’t he?’ She smiled. ‘When we were younger I found it almost – almost attractive. But that last time he was more. . . worried.’ Shay was still watching her. ‘Perhaps he was just concerned for the fate of the army. He’d been with them for part of the journey down from Scotland, and. . .’ – she looked up at him hesitantly – ‘I suppose you men can tell when the crisis of a conflict is near.’

‘Yes, perhaps that was it. Was he talking about the army?’

‘No – no, of course not.’ It would have been as much indecorous as indiscreet. ‘He seemed fretful. Talking of this and that. Pontefract.’

‘Pontefract?’

‘It’s not that far.’

‘I know where it is. Why on earth should he fret about Pontefract?’

Lady Sarah Saville shrugged, and smiled with a shyness out of place on her fifty years. The affairs of men.

‘I once asked him why he was interested, and he said that Pontefract would tell him much.’

What had Astbury been fussing about?
He was more curious than concerned.

Her face was closer to his suddenly, and Shay felt the breath of her whisper. ‘If only you’d been able to ask Marmaduke Langdale.’

‘Langdale?’

The voice was an excited murmur; she was a girl again. ‘He was here!’