Traitor's Field (28 page)

‘That’s disrespectful!’ There was genuine affront in her tone. ‘He trusted me.’

Shay let a long slow hiss out through his teeth, not looking at her, and turned again and walked away.

‘He burned his papers.’

The heavy shoulders stopped still, two black boulders in the gloom. Rose with a breath; dropped.

‘His last visit here. Just before he went off to die in the battle at Preston. He carried the papers out and burned them. Jacob helped him. I saw, and he didn’t mind. I may be a wo—’

Sir Mortimer Shay turned to face her again, and she recoiled at something in his eyes: a ferocity, a wildness, a capacity for – for anything.

He took a step closer. She started to speak, and stopped. Another step closer. Then his hand reached up in front of her breasts, and the finger and thumb clamped firmly under the fragile line of her jaw. His eyes flicked left and right, and she knew he was listening. She also knew that none of the servants would be nearby at this time. The first alarm overcome, her mouth nonetheless opened instinctively, but the heavy forefinger of his left hand rose slowly to his lips, and still his eyes bored into her.

He began to move forward, and his finger and thumb pushed against her throat, and she retreated, one clumsy step, another, and immediately she knocked against a timber with head and shoulders and rump, and gave a little gasp.

Still his hand was under her jaw, where the fine bone gave way to flesh: not hard, not choking, but with a soft certainty that held her trapped, her feet not quite flat on the ground.

‘The girl is bursting out to be a woman, isn’t she?’ he said, a hard murmur. ‘And the woman is bursting out to be free.’ He shook his head. ‘Believe me, if once you taste the world you dream of, you will wish yourself back in the cradle.’

The brown eyes –
beautiful; a doe, a falcon
– were wide: alarm; anger.

‘Somewhere between the nursery and a dream of marriage you found that adulthood was a secretive place, and you found George Astbury more secretive than most. Now here is Shay, whom the world mistrusts, and he is more secretive than any. And you want to be let in, don’t you?’ He turned her chin a fraction. ‘Lord, you probably want to decorate.’

He released her. But before his hand dropped away he lifted a finger and, apparently absorbed, ran it down one side of her satin jaw.

‘One day, very possibly, I will need to trust you. One day, perhaps, I will come to you desperate for some help or protection that you alone may give me. And you should fear that moment as it were a snake.’ He leaned closer. ‘Trust kills.’

He left.

Rachel Astbury stared after him, venomous.

Shay had been on the track of his man for thirty-six hours. Fugitives from Pontefract could be traced easily enough, if one knew the right people to ask and the right kind of persuasion. This one was harder than some: a room paid for but not used; a false trail laid through a wood; the doubling back towards the fallen town. On foot now: disappearing, not fleeing. A man who cared that he might be followed, and knew how to avoid it. Nevertheless, Shay had the scent fully now, and had followed it to a stable on the edge of Wakefield.

He’d watched the stable for half an hour, and watched for movements near it. Only one heavy-timbered door, and he’d been ten minutes in checking through the gaps in the planks and feeling at the latch, and easing through. Eyes closed for the last seconds before entering so that his vision came quickly in the gloom, and he’d been fast into the shadow of a beam. Then more minutes working along the stalls, feet slow and ungainly up and gingerly down into the straw, past four silent, shifting horses. A sudden whinny from the first, now behind him, and he stopped; head still, eyes shifted back the way he’d come. 

The beast caught his glance, and shook its head dismissively. He waited until he could hear the others’ breaths again – waited until he inhabited the silence, knew its rhythms and corners. And so to the last stall, and the distinctive huddle of a body under a blanket against the wall.

A glance all around him, and forward. The blanket covered the body from boot to head. Nearby, the proper inhabitant of the stall stood watching him; a shiver of the sleek head, a subdued whiffle, and hooves shifted in the straw. Shay could see the crushed area of straw where the horse had slept, alongside the body.

That’s wrong.

He spun, knife up in his left hand, but his wrist was caught in a fierce grip and he was back against a beam with a blade at his throat.

Dark flat eyes in a worn face. Killing eyes. ‘You’d not planned on a knife through your neck, I think.’

Shay’s eyes narrowed. ‘Nor you a bullet through your belly.’ And there was a click, heavy and loud between them.

The man pushed the knife forward a fraction so that it broke the mottled skin of Shay’s neck, and allowed his eyes to drop for an instant before they flicked up again. It had been enough to see the pistol.

A flicker of life came into the eyes. ‘Predicament.’

Shay smiled. ‘Comfortable balance.’

‘You’re well-dressed for a horse-thief.’

‘And you for a groom.’ The man’s clothes, as much as Shay could glimpse through eyes kept still by the knife at his throat, were of quality but not ostentatious. A soldier as well as a gentleman.

The man said, ‘And now?’

‘You’re a fugitive from Pontefract, and no ordinary soldier. I have tracked you, but alone. I fancy we might spare each other the time for a word.’ He breathed in carefully, and then there was another distinct click from the pistol.

The knife held at his throat a moment more, and then flicked away. The body seemed to relax, and the knife disappeared. A nod into the stall. ‘Something told you the trick. At the last.’

‘Mm. Horse wouldn’t sleep so close to a stranger.’ A small scowl of real irritation on the face. Shay continued to examine it. ‘Man makes a mistake sometimes.’

‘Some men can’t afford to make more than one.’

Shay nodded. ‘False trails. Traps. A man who lives a permanent ambush.’

‘If you don’t keep pace with life, you lose it.’ He was examining Shay as intently. ‘You seem to know the habit, sir.’ The eyes widened. ‘Wait: a man who tracks fugitives of the King, but not for ill; a man who knows every trick of the skirmish. Great gods. . . are you Shay?’ 

Shay’s eyes went cold. ‘Not a name it’s safe to know, sir.’

A faint shake of the head. ‘Nor, I imagine, to bear.’ A quick decision. ‘I am Teach.’

A slow nod from Shay. ‘Yes. I thought you might be.’

Shay and Teach found an inn on the road between Wakefield and Leeds, tended by a squint-eyed girl and her shambling, purple-nosed father, who roamed from room to room exchanging silent accusations. Shay and Teach had a room, and a fire, to themselves.

Shay pulled three packaged papers from a pocket, and undid the first. ‘How was Pontefract?’

‘You know a siege, I think?’ A grunt from Shay. ‘So you know the conditions. The only question, ever, is whether the spirit and the water last long enough for relief to come.’

‘And this time there was no relief.’

‘We noticed.’ He said it without humour. ‘In the siege, in the end, men forget what they’re fighting for.’ He shook his head in distaste. ‘Mere survival. Futility; and the women and children crying.’

‘The command?’

‘Well enough. Morrice; John. Colonel. I’d heard reports of weakness and vice, but I saw none of that, and he was tested enough. Some put him out as a deceiver, for he was Parliament’s man before. He was bitter at them, right enough, and that made him determined. He captured the castle himself last year, and it was by patient planning and daring. As a commander: disciplined; respected.’

Shay’s face was in the paper. ‘What communications had you with friends outside?’

Teach turned to face him, careful. ‘Some.’

Shay looked up, and then down again. ‘Reverend Beaumont is dead; hanged.’

‘And none shall follow him by my loose tongue.’ He watched Shay a moment longer, and then smiled at his own caution. ‘Very well. There was a way: a courier who knew a way out through the ditches and the slums, and would deliver messages to a church.’

‘Who knew of this?’

‘Two or three of us.’

Shay left the names, for now. He pushed the first paper into his pocket again, opened the second, and after a moment threw it into the fire, watching it flare and vanish. ‘Did you ever know George Astbury?’

‘What do you know of him?’

‘He’s another dead man, Teach – another man who can no longer be betrayed.’ The head came forward. ‘But a man whose work others must continue.’

Teach absorbed this, and nodded. ‘He sent me into Pontefract. Probably flattering, but by the time we were living on dogs and cats I was cursing him.’ A smile. ‘Horses, dogs, cats, rats, and worms we kill. . .’

‘. . . but the worms will revenge and have their fill.’ A child’s joke that defined men, and their smiles were forced. Shay went on: ‘And Astbury encouraged you to write to him, perhaps.’

‘He did. I had done so for him before, when I was in attendance on the King.’

Shay nodded, glanced at him, and looked into the fire again.

Teach had seen the glance clear enough. ‘And you will have suggestions for me now, perhaps.’

‘I could make a speech about duty and loyalty and honour, if it would help.’ He was opening the third packet.

‘Save it. I believe in none of them, not any more. But while I live I’ll live as well as I can.’

Shay nodded again. ‘Ireland. I fancy—’ He stopped, gazing down at the open paper on his hand; ‘I fancy the war will shift there.’

Teach’s face soured, grim. ‘By God, it doesn’t get any easier, does it?’

‘No.’

‘I need to eat, Shay. I have no family, no estate. But I hope to. Eventually. When this madness is done.’

‘I understand. You’ll not be forgotten.’

‘In Ireland? Whole armies have been forgotten there. When?’

‘A month or two yet. But you could do me at least one service in the meantime.’ He opened his hand: the third paper, with a very few words on it in an elegant script; and, wrapped in it, the coiled shimmer of a seashell. ‘I’m summoned, and I may need a man at my back.’

Lyle, Thomas Scot’s man in Doncaster, operated out of a rented room above a dairy. Thurloe had the vague instinct that his having been blown up in the pursuit of duty entitled him to come and go there more freely, to a little more respect. For himself, his feelings wavered: a little heroic; somehow a little foolish.

Lyle, to be fair, had changed his tone somewhat: still patronizing, but with an acknowledgement that Thurloe had been blooded. When Thurloe walked in he was sitting at a table, surrounded by papers: handwritten reports; one paper with an odd pattern of holes spaced in it; printed news-sheets. He was reading one page and writing laboriously on another. He finished a word, and then his eyes flicked up. ‘Hallo, Hotspur,’ he said, and smiled without warmth. ‘What you blown up today?’

Tarrant was standing against the window frame, arms folded tight together as if holding his energy in with difficulty. As soon as he saw Thurloe he was fully upright, frowning; then he subsided again stiffly. Tarrant’s tone had changed little. He’d claimed irritation that Thurloe hadn’t somehow done more. There was also, Thurloe thought, a faint sense of envy.