Traitor's Field (24 page)

At the parlour table, he watched the tricks and flickers of her face, the stubborn handsome bones of brow and chin, with the old wonder.

‘How goes the world?’ she asked.

‘They killed the King.’

‘We heard so, even here. Poor Stuart: truly a brave and decent man, but he twisted himself quite inside out trying to be his own monstrous father.

Were you in the killing?’

‘I had rather tried to avoid it.’

‘Poor Mortimer. So tiresome for you when the world goes awry.’ She settled her hand on his forearm. ‘And now you are putting it to right again.’

‘We’ll muddle through. There is another King, and he will have his birthright soon enough. No one expected the killing, and few wanted it.’ He checked her face: he felt safe in its incisive understanding of the world. ‘These people in Parliament, and the Army, they have kicked a wasp’s nest: in the counties, in Ireland, probably in Scotland too. And now they will argue among themselves.’ He took another mouthful of bread. ‘How goes it here?’

‘Well enough. Your wars have left us poor equally, and there are still some extra mouths fled from Denbigh, and that’s long ago now.’ She watched him chewing. ‘There was a distemper in the pigs in many of the farms last autumn. The younger mare died.’ He grunted. ‘I sold two strips over towards the gut.’

‘By the hawthorns?’

‘There. A good young man. Gareth knows the family.’

‘Good.’ He settled his hand over hers. ‘I can’t stay long, Meg.’

She squeezed his arm fiercely.

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Four eyes were staring at Thurloe, as if considering their supper – and then finding it rancid.

‘Oliver St John himself commends this man to us, Master Tarrant.’ Thomas Scot, Parliament’s chief of intelligence, a pair of rheumy eyes protruding from a pale wilderness of wrinkles. ‘Commends, I say. We may interpret: commands.’ A black cap, white hair thick from under it, and Thurloe saw that the head shook very slightly at the end of each sentence.

The second pair of eyes was close beside the first – unnaturally close, in the face of a younger man trying to derive authority from his chief.

Scot still: ‘And these days, I think we may infer another voice behind Master St John, doing the commending – and the commanding. Isn’t that so, Master Thurloe?’

Tarrant was dark and thin, perhaps nearing forty, in a new black coat. ‘Oliver – Cromwell,’ he said. He was trying to sneer, but wariness kept the voice too low for it to work.

‘A man who serves Cromwell, serves England and serves God – isn’t that so, Thurloe?’

Thurloe was still waiting for a question or statement he could reasonably answer. ‘Is there somewhere I should sit?’ he said politely. ‘Anything I can start to work on?’

Scot stepped away, leaving Tarrant becalmed by the desk, gazed at a wall of bristling pigeon-holes, and turned back to face Thurloe. ‘I continue to press the Council to formalize this work, but still we are mere hobbyists. The new Government of England is infested with enemies. The dispossessed Court in exile. Plotters and financiers and intelligencers in the Netherlands. Royalist allies and temporizers in Ireland and Scotland. Restive groups in every county, waiting for a sunny day and a rallying cry to storm the nearest town. Agitators, seditious printers, counterfeiters, rogue preachers, false prophets, indifferent magistrates, sentimental peasants. And faint-hearts in Parliament, and even’ – his head pulled back and his eyes narrowed, watching Thurloe’s reaction – ‘some men at the top of the Army, who would stop the calendar or turn it back a page or two, men who fear the honest instincts to liberty of those who have done the fighting.’

‘Yes,’ Thurloe said. ‘Perhaps I should get to work.’

‘Not everyone knows how hard it is,’ Tarrant said. He leaned forward and added, ‘It’s hard.’

‘Thank you,’ Thurloe said. ‘I understand.’

‘No concerns about Master Thurloe, Tarrant. Thurloe was at the University. A lawyer. Master St John commends Thurloe’s shrewdness and intellect.’

Tarrant didn’t seem impressed by Thurloe’s shrewdness and intellect.

‘A particular friend of Cromwell and St John may work as he pleases, and we shall not presume to command him.’ The tension in the cheeks relaxed, and Scot seemed suddenly wearier. ‘We shall be grateful for your co-operation, Master Thurloe. Time by time you may profit by working beside Tarrant here.’

Tarrant did not seem impressed by this either. He led the way out, and Thurloe followed. In the doorway he hesitated, and glanced back, just as Scot glanced up from his table. A large ledger was open in the exact centre of the table. The old man looked at Thurloe uncertainly, as though surprised to find him there, and then with a faint discomfort.

‘I have my views, Master Thurloe, and I apprehend that General Cromwell finds them extreme and over-exacting for his politics. But I believe that we are achieving a cause in this land – a great cause, a millennium on earth – and I will esteem any man who contributes honestly to that cause.’ The chin was held high, the lips pressed, as if defying anticipated criticism.

The sudden sincerity was striking, and Thurloe nodded slowly.

The 26th of February: Lieutenant-Colonel Lilburne stands among the members of the House of Commons, who look down on him variously indifferent and uneasy. A troublemaker, Lilburne. Argue with himself when he can’t find another. Imprisoned, pilloried, flogged in the time of the King. Popular causes at the time, of course, and perhaps we got a little caught up in the romance of the man; but with hindsight maybe it was disputatiousness rather than principle.

A trim man, Lilburne; dapper even. Tidy curls and a sprightly moustache. Still young, surely; but suffering has greyed and cracked his face, and the shoulders are thin under the black coat. He makes a point of standing very upright, but it seems to pain him. Damp prison cellars and the lash have bent him before his time.

As he starts to speak, the indifferent become interested and the uneasy become angry. He talks softly, Lilburne, through his fever-weakened throat, and that always makes them lean forwards. He has his hat in one hand and a paper in the other, and the hat seems to flutter, as if some unexpected breeze in the chamber will blow him over. The words are hoarse but painstakingly articulated.

Lilburne talks of liberties, of freedoms, and of truth. Lilburne talks of the new slavery in which England finds herself. Alarm and a broiling murmur around the chamber. He refers to the paper in his hand, and as he does so, and again, every man in the chamber focuses ever more closely on the paper, as if it is growing in front of them, or about to take wing, or burst into flames.