Traitor's Field (20 page)

The King’s advisers, now always in shadows and murmur.

‘The negotiators have gone. This phase is done.’

‘Parliament must needs think on the King’s answers.’

‘We cannot wait!’

A huddle of hunched shoulders, tense and belligerent in the gloom of the ante-room.

‘The negotiators are desperate for an agreement with us. They told me so.’

‘They have not got that agreement. They are gone because their cause is hopeless.’

‘Delay will worsen the divisions between Parliament and Army. The King has done most skilfully.’

‘Delay will push the Army to intervene. The King is lost!’

Wild eyes flickering candlelight at each other – frustrated, angry, captive, lost, uncertain.

‘The calculation has changed. The King must be got away.’

‘The King refuses!’

‘He must be counselled. I am advised—’

‘Seymour, I grow tired of your secret voices. Who are these men and why should we heed them?’

‘We speak of the safety of the King, and of the realm!’

‘We do not know wherein lies that safety. I tell you we do not know now!’

Charles Stuart, huddled in the large oak chair, alone:

Oh, how I have yearned for this silence. No one stares at me, no one asks questions of me, no one can see my hands, my height, my uncertain lips. No one waits for me to fail or to weep. No one to trap me now.

I beat them. Their armies and their books and their theories, they thought they had me at disadvantage; they thought I – they thought that I, the King – could be manoeuvred and wheedled. I beat them. I was cleverer than they were. Perhaps now a little respect. Perhaps the whispers in the London streets, the clever lawyers at their dinners, perhaps these will say at last that Charles Stuart is a King indeed, and a King truly for England, and a wronged man.

I hope that they were satisfied. They seemed so disappointed. I had thought their entreaties, their genuflections, mere masque-show; but they left apparently so disheartened. I hope they will give good report of me to their Parliament. They are my people, I am their King, and I am doing as I see best. If only these people would understand me.

But perhaps they will be angry. I have delayed them; I have temporized and cavilled. I have double-dealt with the Army in the same hour. Will they be angry with me? By what right could they be, with me, their King? But they will be angry nonetheless. They were always angry, because I am clever and I am different. Would that they could once understand me. Would that they could love me for who I am.

There was a new face among my advisers; the hunted sheep. A dark, grim face. A face I thought I recognized, and somehow an ill memory. A spy? Or was the face even there? Was this not some angel of darkness that I alone could see?

Escape, they say. I would I were free of all of this. There have been periods of my life – there have been facets of myself – when I have felt truly comfortable: a fit body, a fluent tongue, a right man, a right King. A trusted horse, moving sure beneath me, and us alone in the trees. Henrietta, and a moment of utter trust together, all discomfort and sin forgot. Did the old King somehow see me in these moments? There have been gardens, there have been hours, there have been alignments of my body and mind, when I have felt truly free.

But if I attempt to fly, it will only make them angry. If I show that I have kept my word, if I tarry regardless and do my duty, then perhaps they will see that I am a King to be trusted. A King to be loved.

Withal, I have nowhere to turn, and nowhere to fly. I am in the Lord’s snare; I am in the Lord’s cage.

One foot shakes on the velvet stool.

Through the window, in the market square, the sudden rattle of many hooves on the cobbles, and shouts. A rescue? Of course not. New soldiers sent by the King’s enemies. But why? And then a rude hammering at the doors below.

Late in the evening in Grimsby town, the rain driving hard out of the darkness of the sea and bustling through the streets, and the wind buffeting unpredictably out of the blackness, a cloaked and hooded man slipped into the Anchor tavern. A respectable place, the Anchor: too close to the waterfront for most of the townspeople, but kept too strict for the common fishermen. A place for cautious tradesmen and sober captains. A place grown tired and silent through the years of war.

The cloaked man, back pressed to keep the door closed against the wind but ready to be out in an instant, checked that the tavern room was empty before letting the latch close fully and taking the last step down.

The landlord watched him carefully, and continued to watch with a mug and a rag held still in his hands as the man crossed the tavern towards him.

The man reached the bar, wet his lips uneasily, and murmured a single word. The landlord’s eyes widened a fraction, and then he nodded.

The cloaked and hooded man said no further word that night, and he said nothing when, in the hour before dawn, he stepped down from Grimsby jetty into a fishing ketch that bobbed and chattered in the black water. The mooring ropes were pulled in while he was still steadying himself on the unfamiliar deck, and the ketch slipped away towards the dawn.

Thus Sir Marmaduke Langdale escaped England. The veteran of all the great battles of the nation’s terrible decade, hero of a dozen desperate charges into history, slipped away in the mists. He would go on to Venice, to war against the Turks at the other end of the Continent, but his journey began with a whispered word in an empty Grimsby tavern.

[SS C/S/48/40]

Sir Mortimer Shay sat on his haunches in a derelict fisherman’s hut on the south coast, the earth floor littered with pebbles and weed and bones and shells, and the air as sharp and cold as if the salt crystals were gusting solid through the window holes, and he watched the white sea and wondered at the character of Oliver Cromwell.

Through the doorway and beyond the sluggish water of the bay, the spit of land stretched across his vision and on the end of the spit he could see Hurst Castle. In this castle, sited in perfect definition of defensibility and framed by a dead sky that defined bleakness, was his King.

Oliver Cromwell had changed his mind. Or, rather, Oliver Cromwell had observed the factors in his world – the divided Parliament, the restive Army, the fickle King – and, as the currents in them had shifted, that mind had recalculated how to sustain the progress and the stability it desired.

Shay didn’t like the sea. He’d crossed it more than once, and every time been the first man hurrying off the boat when solid land was reached. He didn’t like this vulnerability in his temperament. He didn’t like the undependable shifting under his feet. Through the rotting bleached door frame the sea stared back at him, one vast dead eye with the grey castle its pupil.

The Army had seized the King, and brought him to the mainland, to that castle. With him, the balance of power in the land had shifted dramatically, and now Parliament waited like a cornered hen.

One of the window holes darkened and blurred suddenly, and then there was a figure in the doorway. Shay was up from his haunches immediately, wincing and irritated at the clumsiness in his knees.

The figure looked uncertainly at Shay, then back the way he’d come, and then to Shay again for reassurance. Shay beckoned him with a flick of his head.

The figure stepped in cautiously, one step only and blinking hard to catch the face in the gloom. Then the eyes widened in surprise. ‘Upon my oath – I had not expected to see you.’

Shay shook his hand, and held it for a moment. ‘I’d be delighted if you forgot you’d seen me. How do you?’

Something between a gasp and a laugh from the other man. ‘I. . . for myself. . . well enough, I suppose, in these strange days.’

‘Good.’ Shay stepped past him, and glanced briefly left and right through the doorway; then he returned to the back wall. 

The newcomer stayed on the threshold. He leaned against the doorpost, in an attempt at nonchalance. ‘London – is – in – ferment.’ He weighted the words emphatically, trying at jocularity. Then London crept up behind him, and he remembered it, and shook his head. ‘Ferment.’

Shay waited.

His visitor stood upright again, nonchalance abandoned. ‘The Army has purged Parliament.’

‘Purged? How?’

‘Soldiers at the door. Three days ago now. Arresting some; refusing entry to others. Those in favour of seeking agreement with the King.’ The words were hurried. He didn’t want to stay. ‘A hundred men or more. As many again now stay away from fear. What’s left is. . .’

Shay let the pause hang, before picking it up. ‘A Parliament ready to try a King, would you say?’

‘A Parliament ready to do the Army’s bidding, whatsoever that may be.’ The dead voice came suddenly alive. ‘What has happened in this land? Even two weeks ago – one week – there was no question but that the King would be at the heart of any settlement. For all the blood, for all the complaints and cries against him, his acquiescence to some settlement was still desired by all. Now there’s every chance we are to be the first Christian land to make a public criminal of our own sovereign.’

Shay realized that he was trying to look past the man, through the doorway to the dead white water. To the castle? An instinctive fear that the King might be bundled off somewhere else unless he kept watch? Or was he just looking for the sea itself? Mortimer Shay needed to see his enemies.

Head tilted to one side, focus over the man’s shoulder, he said flatly: ‘Oliver Cromwell has happened in this land.’ His focus shortened, to the shadowed face in front of him. ‘I mistook him, I confess. I thought him merely the blunt instrument of the independent men in Parliament, the luckiest of the Army’s commanders.’ He took in a great acrid sniff, fish and salt and the cold bleached air, and shook his head once and ominous. ‘I begin to see it now. He has a greater perspective than any of them. A clarity of vision; a clarity of purpose.’