Traitor's Field (15 page)

Away towards the trees, beyond the soldiers, there were shouts, hooves drumming hard and free on open ground.

Thurloe had reached the gate, barging through the sentries and roaring them to action. As his boots thumped onto the bridge he saw the two fugitives bucking and grappling with soldiers: saw one soldier grabbing at one of the fugitives and half pulling him down, saw the fugitive, an older man surely, reacting with weird calm and pushing a pistol back under his armpit and firing and the soldier tumbling away. The fugitive swung upright, the horse wheeled, and for a moment his eyes met Thurloe’s. And beyond them all came three riders, haring across the open ground with heads bent low over their horses and swords levelled as they accelerated towards the bridge and the mêlée. Thurloe was halfway over the bridge when the riders struck. The soldiers staggered, fell away in one furious tempest of blades, scattered, and now all five horsemen were free and away and making, unstoppable, for the trees.

Shay, General Langdale and their three rescuers rode their horses hard and silent for five miles, sometimes by road and sometimes across country. Shay had rapidly assumed the lead, and the others followed automatically. As they’d approached a junction, one of the unknown three had pulled level with him and beckoned to the north, open fields and the distant shadow of the hills across the land. But Shay had shaken his head briefly and bent again to the horse, sitting heavy and intent and urging the animal onward. With a shrug and glance of frustration at his companions, the younger man had fallen back and followed.

As they came over a rise, Derby appeared on the horizon in front of them, and then disappeared again behind trees as they rode on. Shay slowed to a trot, turned in the saddle and beckoned the young man nearest. A pale face, long fair hair, and he trotted nearer and started to speak.

Shay cut him off. ‘The wood, ahead there. You three will skirt it southwards until you reach a track running north by west. You will take that line until a junction with a dead elm. There right, and so shortly into the trees. We will regather there.’

‘But—’

‘We must take the road now, and the road becomes more open and more travelled. They will be seeking news of five riders, not two or three.’ Shay saw the puzzled, irritated expression. ‘You are a hunted man, now, and you must learn fast. The first lesson is that you don’t have time for explanations.’

‘But can’t we—’

‘You can do as you’re bid, or die on the road where you are. No more than a trot, now.’

John Thurloe had spent a full hour in silence. He stood at the door to the now empty cell, reached for the handle, then stopped himself. He stood looking at the slit of darkness into the secret passage, took a breath and stepped towards it, then stopped himself. Then he walked back out of the castle as he had come in – the conventional route – and found his way by indifferent sentries to the external entrance to the passage.

He entered the castle again, as the intruder had entered, scuffling and stumbling through the caves until a boot-tip kicked a rough step, and so up in darkness until the faintest whisper of light promised life again and the old wardrobe. Then he walked softly to the cell, and this time, after a moment, he opened the door and entered. He stood. He perched on the edge of the palliasse. He noted the hiding place in the wall.
Men of concealment. Men of initiative.
He sat on the chair. He listened. He left the cell, trying to elude the door’s creak.

He was trying and failing to forget the trick with the pistol, fired back under the arm: an expert’s trick, instinctive and immediate and sure.

He was clutching at spirits he could neither quite recall nor be sure of, these men who were not like him, spirits from a different time or a different world. At one point, the hot red face of Governor Hutchinson had thrust into his vision again. The Governor was embarrassed, and confused, and trying to find a way in which Thurloe and the Committee for Security were responsible for what had happened today. The words came singly and incoherent, and Thurloe had just looked at him, silently, and eventually the Governor stamped away back to his violated lair.

The secret passage. The cell. The passages between them and the passage leading to the other side of the castle and the escape. 

There had to be somewhere else. There had to be somewhere to wait while the foolish Parliament men bumbled around in the cold warren of tunnels, while they gaped stupidly at the empty cell and summoned the courage to step into the darkness of the Prince’s secret passage.

There were any number of places: side tunnels, abandoned chambers, piles of rubble.
Compensatory lengthening affects first aorist forms whose verbal root ends in a sonorant.
Did the spirits know this place or were they guessing? The secret passage; the escape through the opposite side of the castle. Were they desperate or calculating? The distraction; the bravado. Discount places with inadequate chance of concealment. Discount places that might be simply or accidentally checked. Discount the indefensible, discount the dead-ends.

In Attic and Ionic Greek, the sigma in the first aorist suffix causes compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel.
It must be a place between the Prince’s passage and the areas where the Governor and the guards were most likely to be. The spirits needed the pursuit to go past them into the cell and the passage and that side of the castle – clattering and shouting, confused and angry, red faces and conflicting orders – leaving the way clear to the other side.

Thurloe at a junction of passageways, looking at the grit around his boots, looking at the patterns in the flagstones, looking down the passage in front of him, past a stairwell entrance to where the dust swirled idle and golden in a column of light from a hole in the roof above.
In Aeolic Greek, the sigma causes compensatory lengthening of the sonorant.
They must have waited for some time:
The letter will bring these foolish Parliament men to the wrong part of the castle, but I can’t cut the time too finely. I don’t know how long I’ll have to wait for the foolish Parliament men to snap at my bait. I can’t risk them coming before I’ve reached my hiding-place. Where might I sit in relative comfort for an hour or so?

Twenty steps up the spiral staircase Thurloe found a spot where the grit had been brushed away by a pair of recent backsides, and scuffings beneath where four boots might have rested for a time.
This’ll do. We can hear the foolish Parliament men scampering past below, we can slip out smart enough, but we’ll have time to get ready if someone does by some chance come up here.

He sat down beside them – on the step below, anyway, as a younger man might.

These men – the one who broke in, at least – they knew this place. They know places like this. This is their country, and it always has been, and I am an interloper.
The remarkable business of the letter.
Was this all fantastic chance?
The effectiveness of the timings, the smoothness with which the foolish Parliament men fitted into the plan.
He knew when the letter would arrive.

He knows our systems
.

The eyes widened a little, and the staircase was momentarily colder. Thurloe pulled his cloak closer around him, and forced himself to settle back against the ancient smoothness of the centre pillar. 

But they cannot have known that I would come today. They did not know of me.
He passed the rest of his hour in more companionable silence, wondering at the men so close to him.

Hot and uneasy and exchanging empty expressions of uncertainty and bravado, the three riders followed the tree line to the track, and the track as it led into open country and to the elm, and then turned as instructed and dropped into the welcome gloom of woodland again. In the shadows they hesitated, their horses breathing heavy and rummaging in the long grass that fringed the roadway.

A rustling from the undergrowth, and the two older men emerged from the trees, shadows from the darkness. Again the first of the three made to speak, and again he was ignored.

Shay led them a further mile, until the wood ended in sight of a watermill, and beyond it Donington. He held them there for several minutes, dappled under the leaves and still silent, while he watched the mill intently.

Eventually he led them down. The mill-owner met them at the gate of his yard. Shay murmured a word to the man, a word that the others could not catch. Without a reply or a glance the gate was pulled open, and Shay was gesturing his companions into the yard while he took a final full scan around them and then followed.

He was the first to dismount, legs falling heavy and tired into the mud. ‘We change horses here.’ Langdale slid down too, stretching his legs uncomfortably.

‘But this is my horse, and a good one!’ Another of the young men.

‘It may be recognized, and that makes it a bad one.’ He nodded towards the mill-man. ‘It’s his now. The horses will be dispersed. Do any have a well-known mark? A brand?’

Confusion, shakes of the head, weary and unhappy climbings down and then the three young men were standing forlorn in the mud as their horses were led away, the mill-man examining them with satisfaction.

‘A mill in the middle of nowhere, and you arrive unannounced and with a single word the man will do your bidding and swap your horses – risk his life?’

Shay turned. The dark-haired one: medium height and compact, quiet-spoken but swallowing irritation. Shay said, ‘There are times when one needs a bed, or a horse, or a friend. One is wise to cultivate such arrangements.’

He looked at all three of them, and then with old courtesy shook each by the hand before stepping back.

‘I’m grateful to you, gentlemen; that was a closer thing than I had conceived it.’ The three had straightened a little; young men, faces proud and clean and open.
Did I look like that a lifetime ago?
‘Might you honour me with your names?’

The compact figure took a step forward. The moustache was not yet a success, but there was nothing frail in the dark brown eyes or the voice. ‘Thomas Balfour, sir, and at your service.’

‘I am glad of it, sir.’

The pale young man spoke, clear strong words from the well-boned face.
Lord, the beauty of the young
. ‘Henry Vyse.’

The third stepped forward, but there was a grunt from behind Shay, and then Langdale’s growl: ‘Vyse? Son of Bernard Vyse – of Kent, and Sussex?’

‘Our lands are all forfeit, General. But I am still the son of Sir Bernard Vyse.’

Langdale nodded. ‘A man could make no prouder boast. And your mother was Hester Carraway.’ A nod, and Langdale grunted again. ‘Give thanks to the Lord nightly, young man, that you got from your father your heart but not your looks.’

The third man, heavy-set and slow-spoken, was Michael Manders, and again Langdale was interested. ‘Your father was beside me at Marston, young man. Losing him was as bad a blow as the battle itself.’

‘This was no longer a world in which he cared to live, sir; and he wanted no other death.’

Shay was still staring into the blue eyes of Henry Vyse; the jaw was solid Vyse, whatever Langdale said, but not those eyes.
Hester Carraway, by God.
He saw a smile, heard a laugh through the decades, sighed a growl at the opening of a bodice.
If I had sired, Lord, might it have been sons like these?