Traitor's Field (16 page)

Vyse spoke. ‘What happens now, sir?’

‘It will not be the season for Generals for some while. I must get Langdale abroad.’

‘How?’

Manders. Shay’s eyes narrowed and hardened at him. ‘Secretly.’ He looked at the others. ‘Take a mug of beer in the mill here, but do not stay for a second one. Return to your normal pastures, but not for three days at least and not without well spying the land.’ He gave them a heavy nod. ‘Again, my thanks to. . . Why did you come after me, by the by?’

Vyse again: ‘You. . . looked a sporting gentleman, sir. A man for a deed not a word.’

Manders, louder: ‘Not enough of that in these days.’

Three of the King’s bloods, standing in the mill-yard dirt. They’d have been too young for most of the fighting. The clothes were of good quality and fine style, but not new. Balfour’s in particular were worn, and perhaps even repaired in one or two spots. A last so-ho! for the old world.

Vyse added, ‘Lady Sarah Saville said that your cause would always be a good one.’
Ah, Sarah, if only that were true.

Shay smiled heavy. ‘You’re bold young men, and sharp.’ He looked at each of the three faces in turn. ‘I will have need of you. A message will come. You’ll not know how or from whom. But there’ll be no doubting it, and when it comes you’ll oblige me by not hesitating.’

Vyse’s eyes widened a fraction. Manders started to speak, stopped, and then merely nodded.

‘Good lad.’

Then the two older men were up on their replacement horses and through the gate and away, and even the memory of them seemed doubtful to the three left standing stupid in an unknown mill, looking at each other and their muddy boots and trying to recall how they came there.

Doncaster early on a Sunday: the first of the sun rising out of the distant German Sea, turning the tower of St George’s pale, so that its stones seem more a part of the opaque sky in which it stands, alone and aloof on the edge of the town, than of the shadowed, furtive streets that scurry from its base.

In them, the town is starting to stir, with its first shiftings and scratchings of morning. Stray dogs begin to snuffle and forage in the gutters. In Frenchgate, in the shadow of the town wall, two sleepy whores stare up sullen and bleary at a window across the street, in which a trim maid is getting dressed. From somewhere, a thoughtless hammering and clattering of wood as a stall is assembled. At gates and junctions and doorways across the town, from the river to the ruins of the old leper house of St James, sentries shift feet, and swap hands on the pikes that prop them up, and try a different shoulder against a pillar, and nod and droop and scowl and roll furred tongues around sour mouths in the weird drifting half-world between sleep and life.

From the St Sepulchre gate, shouting and then the rumble and rattle of hooves at the trot.

A military town now, Doncaster, but comfortable with it: the base of operations for the siege of Pontefract a day’s march away, it bustles confident, with the self-righteous imperative of duty and no danger. The soldiers thieve and scuffle and harass the girls, but there’s money enough flowing, for the innkeepers and the tailors and the smiths, for the pimps and the dips and the dice-sharps, and the town feels prosperous and satisfied as it wakes.

The hooves echoing from different corners of the town now, tricksy and unsettling and unseen in the winding streets. The heavy breaths of horses standing in the High Street. Uninterested glances from sentry posts and windows. Words to a soldier, insistence, a shrug. Boots on a wooden stair. Voices again, then shouts and the vicious hiss of swords drawn, a grabbing at half-dressed men, wild eyes and anger and fear, and boots on the stair again and the sentry with a blade at his throat and the doorway to the High Street explodes in figures, wrestling and dragging and cursing. A scuffle around the horses, the animals edgy and shifting and hard to mount. Shouts, orders, boots slipping clumsily out of stirrups that won’t stay still. Always the shouting, exhortation and intimidation and the Lord God invoked for all sides and purposes on his violated sabbath. ‘Move, damn you! Up! Mount up!’ Sword-points at breasts, a pistol jammed into a shirt front. ‘Up, damn you, or die here! Help him, then.’ Glances, curses, a chance, a lunge and a sudden frenzied scuffling, clumsy grappling for arms and weapons. ‘No! We don’t—’ and blades are rattling at each other and the Doncaster morning finally snaps in a pistol shot, and a scream, and now the swords cannot be stopped because blood can smell blood, and the swords are bickering and chattering and nothing is certain in the scrum of frightened animals, and from the muddle of shouts come more cries of pain, affronted and furious, and final. A moment of stupid bewilderment, because the works of men are inexplicable to themselves above all, then insistence and orders and the hurried sheathing of weapons and the grappling with saddles and reins, and the horses whirl and stutter, and then the hooves batter away down the cobbles like musket volleys.

Two men die on the cobbles, pale and half-dressed and shocked, and cold.

With a mighty thump, both of the pair of elegant doors burst open and before they had slammed against the walls the explosion himself was in the room, the big features angry, the hands still held high and flexing and unflexing as if looking for something to throttle, striding forward unstoppable by any earthly force. ‘Rainsborough is dead!’

Oliver St John was standing on a low platform, head held high, one hand cocked against his hip and the other poised in elegant gesticulation, the long lace cuff rendering the wrist apparently lighter than air; his breeches were deep and heavy black, which only emphasized the richness of the doublet, brown turning to gold: a Chief Justice of England, and he looked and felt it. He raised an eyebrow.

Cromwell needed a Royalist cavalry troop on which to vent his anger. ‘Hacked down in a Doncaster street while the Army snored!’

St John contrived not to lower his chin, but the eyes dropped into a frown. ‘God be with him and grant him rest.’ He glanced at the man working in front of him, hands still full of palette and brushes and now staring uncomfortably between his patron and the newcomer. The man had never met Master Cromwell, but Master Cromwell was the most dangerous man in the country. Master Cromwell was also, very obviously, in a black blazing fury.

‘I pray that he may. He is unlikely to do as much for us.’

St John frowned again, sighed, and then waved the artist away. The artist retreated hurriedly and happily, head down and still clutching his tools.

‘Not to imply anything less than complete Christian charity in you, Cromwell, but Rainsborough was hardly a convenient person for us.’ He stepped down from the platform and strolled to the easel.

‘He was a brave man, and a man of princ—’

‘Spare me.’ St John peeked round the easel at his new eternal self. ‘For us, he was a damned dangerous nuisance.’

Cromwell would not stand still. ‘He remains so. Thomas Scot and his group are crying murder and conspiracy. They will not accept that this was a Royalist assassination. Rainsborough is like to be their first Leveller martyr, and they will use him to make all the mischief they can.’

‘Of course.’

‘They demand an investigation.’

St John nodded. ‘Then we should give them one.’

‘Scot himself is our chief intelligencer. You countenance unleashing him – in his current mood? He will upend society – he will upend the Army, if he can.’

St John was scowling at his other face. ‘Mm. Not him, of course. But I have a better man.’

‘I have better men digging privies.’

A pained smile. ‘More apt, and more able. I got him some clerkship – Cursitor’s fines – and use him on discreet errands. A man of great shrewdness and great good sense.’

‘Godly?’

‘Not ungodly. I don’t think we need bring our Lord into this overmuch. Baines!’ The last a roar, and a head appeared between the doors immediately. ‘Baines, find Thurloe. Find him wherever he lurks, and have him to Master Cromwell before day’s end.’

MERCURIUS FIDELIS

or

The hone
ſ
t truth written for every Engli
ſ
hman that cares to read it

From
M
ONDAY
, O
CTOBER
26.
to
M
ONDAY
, N
OVEMBER
2. 1648.