Traitor's Field (26 page)

Withal, he is a stranger, and I have let him into the house with me.

The consciousness of her vulnerability, and of his scrutiny of her body, made her more sharply aware of being a woman.

I do not know this man. I do not know what he does or what he is capable of. I do not know why they fear him.

The Parliamentary Army deployed around Pontefract were edgy, excited. Something was happening. Word was trotting among the ranks and tents and sentry-points: the Royalist garrison inside were close to surrender; had finally agreed to surrender; had surrendered already?

Thurloe was wary in crowds: crowds were unpredictable, irrational, inhuman. He stood among the scattered expectant soldiers, watching the castle walls two hundred yards off, and wondering what he was supposed to be seeing.

Not for the first time since they’d been standing there, Tarrant, a yard or two to his side, stabbed a sidelong glance at him. Thurloe’s presence was unplanned. Word had come to Thomas Scot three days before that surrender was likely, and Tarrant had hurried north. Thurloe had ridden with him as far as Nottingham because he had a defaulting Royalist to investigate, but that case was delayed and so he’d invited himself to continue to Pontefract.

‘You seen much fighting, Thurloe?’

Thurloe ignored him. He’d found it an increasingly satisfactory tactic with Tarrant. It unsettled him, too, which was amusing to watch.

There was a shout from nearer the walls, indistinct. Immediately the men around them shuffled, and murmured, and Thurloe and Tarrant strained to see what was happening. Gradually, the excitement subsided again.

‘What are you fighting for, Thurloe?’

This got his attention, and he turned and held Tarrant’s glance.

‘I’m not fighting for anything. This land needs stable and good government if it is to thrive. There are some decent, able men capable of providing it. This fighting is a necessary phase we have to pass to get to that.’

‘Would you have killed the King?’ Tarrant presented it as a test.

‘No.’ There was a little sneer of triumph on Tarrant’s face. ‘But I don’t care that he’s dead. Why, what are you fighting for?’

‘I’m fighting so men like me, without money and without university time, can make a life in this country. I’m fighting to be done with all the special groups of men who set themselves above – Kings, and priests and such. I’m fighting for the honest ordinary man against all the clever-clever men who just want to limit liberty and run the world for themselves.’

Thurloe considered this. ‘There are more stupid men than clever ones,’ he said after a moment. ‘I think you’re in with a chance. But yours sounds rather like the Leveller manifesto.’

Tarrant’s eyes narrowed, and a smile started to creep onto his face. And then a hand landed on his shoulder, and he turned. A shorter, darkly handsome man. Greetings, and Thurloe was introduced to Lyle. Lyle was an associate who’d been based in Doncaster during the siege – Thurloe assumed this meant that he was Thomas Scot’s channel of information in and out – and Lyle had facts.

Tarrant and Lyle exchanged a few sentences of murmurs, glancing at Thurloe, who affected to ignore them.

‘Gate’s open,’ Tarrant said, holding his excitement back. ‘Surrender ceremony in one hour. The Army’s starting to take control inside, and the Royalist middle ranks will be trying to get away. We’re going to slip into the castle and see what we can find.’ 

He turned to go, and Thurloe stepped forward.

‘You coming?’

‘I’m coming.’

‘You could get unlucky, University. You could get hurt.’

‘Or I could get lucky, and you could get hurt.’

Tarrant scowled, and turned again and started to walk. 

I could get unlucky. I could get hurt.

Thurloe followed, stride for stride.

Tarrant does not want me to follow him. I mistrust Tarrant. Ergo, I must follow him.

Outside the main gate of the castle, soldiers were beginning to drift together for the formal parade to mark the surrender. The open ground  a plain of mud after the winter and the constant traffic of the besiegers  was a scrum of drifting men, some in uniform and some not, and there were women among them. Small groups of soldiers were stopping and questioning individuals, apparently at random, though it seemed that a lie or a pretty face would get past them. As they neared the castle gate itself, the three of them had constantly to push past shoulders and skirt uniforms disinclined to move aside.

‘Chaos,’ Lyle said under his breath.

‘There’s supposed to be an outer cordon,’ Tarrant said.

‘Half the garrison could have escaped before they’ve even properly surrendered.’

At the castle gate, a platoon of pikemen was tramping over a wooden drawbridge that shuddered under their rhythm. Lyle, Tarrant and Thurloe kept pace with them and so passed through the wall, the yellow stone gouged and discoloured after the months of siege.

The platoon tramped on through the mud and turned a corner, leaving the three men in relative isolation just inside the new-conquered land. Sentries behind them at the gate; around them, among the houses and makeshift shelters that filled the castle precincts, half-seen in shadows and alley entrances, a handful of hollow-cheeked defenders, unarmed and suspicious. And suddenly Thurloe felt the strangeness of it all:
these gaunt dirty faces are my enemies, and my countrymen; we have fought to defeat them, and now we must find a way to reconcile them; the battle is over, but this still feels like hostile, foreign ground.

‘Get separated,’ Lyle said, ‘and there’s still men who’ll cut your throat. If you’re coming’ – this to Thurloe – ‘you’d better have this.’ And he pushed a knife into Thurloe’s hand.

Thurloe took it instinctively, looked around more anxiously at the street, and then down at the knife.

I don’t know what to do with this. I don’t even know where I’m supposed to put it
.

The hollow faces watched him, impassive. The three men began to squelch down the main track. From someone, Lyle had learned where the commandery was, and Tarrant and Thurloe followed a pace behind him.
Am I a conqueror?
Thurloe wondered.
I didn’t even know I was at war.
Still the faces, still the hungry protruding eyes. This place had been Royalist, and then Parliamentarian, and nine months Royalist again, and now it was for Parliament once more. In every alleyway there was furtive movement. Commanders would have to risk the judgement of those who had defeated them. Soldiers could be imprisoned or transported. But the civilians who had survived in battered Pontefract would be wondering how to accommodate themselves again. Men might have to contribute to a fine; men might just drift away in the bustle and new ease of the besiegers. It was an unfastened place for now, this swamp of mud and wreckage, of lives and loyalties in transition. Thurloe glanced warily into the alleys and doorways.

The commandery was a ramshackle improvised hive, an old tower of the castle, built in the same distinctive stone, with newer generations of building added on in different stone and wood and plaster and even sheeting. The months of destruction had further disordered it, and the exterior was a madness of irregularity, like a building put together wrongly or inside-out.

Lyle led the way in, and up a short flight of stairs. Perhaps he knew the place of old; perhaps he was very confident; perhaps his information was good. 

At the top of the stairs, an open chamber, and the three of them kicked around it for a minute. Scattered debris of a besieged life – mugs and helmets and chairs half-smashed for wood. A greasy pewter plate in one corner, with the skeleton of a small animal picked clean on it. A fire had burned recently in the grate, but the residue was ash only.

Lyle led them up another flight of half a dozen steps, a side passage leading off halfway up. As he passed it, Thurloe on a stubborn whim decided he’d had enough of seeing what the other two had already seen, and turned off into the passage.

The two other pairs of feet stamped up the steps away from him, and then onto a wooden floor somewhere.

Thurloe was in a short corridor, flagstone floor, a stone wall on one side, plaster wall on the other; three doors, two open. He peered through them, one after the other. Gloom, disorder, filth, stench. Humans as animals; there was no residue of humans as thinking, superior beings here, traitorous or otherwise.

He pushed open the third door. A man – perhaps his own age – bright red hair and a corresponding pale face – was squatting on the floorboards in front of a fire. He had a small barrel between his legs for some reason, and a lighted taper in one hand, and a tied sheaf of papers in the other.

The man’s eyes and mouth widened in instinctive surprise, but then out of the madness of this dislocated world he contrived a wide, warm grin.

‘Such a cold day,’ he said pleasantly, and set fire to the sheaf of pages and laid it squarely in the glowing grate.

Out of the strangeness, Thurloe heard himself say, ‘What was it?’

Still the man only smiled.

The foot of the sheaf was fully aflame now, and the whole was starting to curl. ‘Why would you. . .?’ 

Still the steady smile, and Thurloe overcame the strangeness and stepped forward with determination. ‘I want that paper!’ Perhaps half of the thin sheaf was pricked with flames.

‘Indeed?’ Still the strange, sprightly calm on the pale face. ‘How much do you want it?’ And the red-headed man lowered the taper to the barrel between his legs, and lit a fuse.

For one insane moment he continued to squat there, grinning at Thurloe while death sparked beneath him. Then as the sputtering flame reached the top of the barrel Thurloe flung himself backwards into the doorway and as he lurched away he saw the other leaping in the opposite direction towards a window and then the world broke open in thunder.

A staggered second later, Thurloe was pulling himself up off the staircase, head ringing and back aching, and the world was a dumb-show. He stumbled to the doorway, and held himself drunkenly between its posts.

The room had ceased to exist. Half the floor was void, the rest scorched timber. The walls were black and pockmarked. The air was smoke and dust and fireflies of burning paper and splinter.

Thurloe lurched around the edge of the room, pressing against the warm walls and feeling the floorboards sagging under him, until he reached the window and stuck his head out. First he felt the precious gust of clear air, then he saw half a dozen people staring up at him, no more than mildly concerned by this new eruption in a whole world in flames. The red-headed man was gone.

Shay stopped Rachel as she was crossing the hall. He was a few paces up the wooden staircase, and she looked up expectantly. A shaft of the morning sun pierced the windows over the porch and, in the gloom of the hall and its dark wood, picked out white a shock of his hair, an eye, a cheek and his teeth, and they seemed wild.

‘Rachel, I was wondering if there was a private place I could use when I am here. To read. Letters and accounts from my own estate. You understand. Did poor old George perhaps have somewhere of his own here?’

Rachel was distracted for a moment by the tension between her recollection of poor old George as her gentle prudent uncle and his violent death in battle. 

Above her, Shay waited, and she was aware again of his bulk. She never seemed to see his whole body clearly – it was always suggested, by shadows, much more of it unseen and looming near her.

‘It wouldn’t, I think, be wise for me to intrude on your father’s domain.’

Flickers of smiles on two mouths, a shared understanding, immediately erased by propriety and – for Rachel – a faint guilt.

‘Of course. There’s a room very near to George’s – your – bedroom. John will show you.’

The room found, and a key with it, Shay stood alone inside its closed door and tried to recreate George Astbury and his habits.

Even George wouldn’t have been foolish enough to keep papers in his bedroom, with servants in and out twice in a day at least. And Shay fancied he’d not instinctively have mixed the over-human realities of his bedroom – smelly sheets and a full piss-pot – with his business affairs. He had checked the bedroom regardless.