Traitor's Field (30 page)

‘I doubt that man fears anyone, save God. But you know it yourself: an Army can have but one loyalty. Once the men begin to pick and choose their cause, and ration their duty according to whim and weather, order collapses.’ He stood suddenly, rubbed his rump, and reached for the wine bottle. ‘Cromwell’s great success was to build an Army around an idea and a discipline. Now he finds they have too many ideas, and it’s costing him his discipline.’ He took a swig, and washed it around his teeth. ‘A different world from your German armies. You have a fancy for these Levellers, I take it.’

‘Mm.’ Shay was looking towards the report again. ‘An enemy distracted and divided; that I fancy.’

John Morrice and Michael Blackburn had been fully two weeks on the run. They were surviving on forest nuts and stream water, and vegetables scrabbled from the ground with their hands, and a piglet stolen near Huddersfield, clumsily slaughtered and part-cooked. They were surviving from ditch to barn, in shadows and half-light, never properly dry and never sleeping properly.

Morrice had some kind of fever. Since their escape from Pontefract they had made seventy miles, a waking dream of meandering, of stumbling.

The fourteenth night they spent in a barn, on sacks and old straw. In the small hours, Blackburn finally found sleep. Morrice continued to shiver and drowse.

He woke with the dawn, conscious immediately of the cold. He had never been warm. Reddened eyes flickered, and focused, and then widened, and immediately he flung a hand out to grab at Blackburn next to him. It took two rough shakes before the younger man woke, bewildered and protesting with questions, and then silent and staring like his Colonel.

Ten feet away, sitting with apparent comfort on a box and against a beam, a man was watching them.

An older man. Heavy built but carrying himself alert. He smiled. 

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he said evenly. ‘I let you sleep on, for I guess you need it. But we shouldn’t wait for much more of the day.’

‘Who—’

‘A friend.’

‘Why should—’

‘Because if I wasn’t, I’d have cut your throats or had you in the hands of the militia by now.’ 

Morrice and Blackburn had shuffled to sitting positions among the sweepings of the barn floor. They knew the truth of the statement; knew the vulnerability they had let themselves fall to. 

‘Since you’re men of prudence and resource who have survived thrice over where most men would not once, it may be your humour not to believe me.’ Again the smile. ‘I approve. You may choose to reveal nothing of your systems and your supporters. From the looks of you, I should say you’d had few of either.’

Morrice said quietly, ‘How did you come upon us?’

‘I have. . . acquaintances, from whom I learn of things of interest hereabouts. Your movements have not gone completely unnoticed.’ Another shared glance of discomfort between the two on the floor. ‘Now, I guess you for fugitives from Pontefract.’

Again the mutual unease. ‘I’ll take that for a yes, if you don’t mind. Names?’ The two hollow, greasy faces pulled back and frowned. ‘I’ve said that I could have killed you or arrested you if I’d wanted. You’ve no fear of arrest from me, and you may stick your head outside and check that I’m alone if you wish. But if you don’t want my help, I’ll bid you farewell and leave you to whichever of starvation and fever and the militia gets you first.’

The older man watched him sourly. ‘Morrice. Colonel. This is Blackburn. Cornet.’

‘Good. Perhaps it reassures you to know that I fear a deception as much as. . . Morrice?’ A cautious nod. ‘You’re a prize and more for a wandering constable, aren’t you, Colonel?’ Morrice’s sourness did not ease. 

The voice suddenly sharpened. ‘In May last year you met two men at an inn outside Leeds to discuss seizing Pontefract. If you’re Morrice, you’ll know the name of the inn.’

‘How do you—’ Morrice stopped, dumb. ‘The – the Black Horse.’ A moment of silence, and he added, ‘Satisfied?’ But the truculence was marred by a sudden fit of coughing.

‘Well enough.’ The stranger reached to one side for a small sack, and threw over two loaves of bread and a bottle of wine. 

Blackburn ground the food into his face, utterly absorbed. Morrice chewed slowly, still watching the man opposite. ‘Do I know you?’ he said after a moment, and there was new respect in the voice.

Mortimer Shay frowned, checking for a recollection of his own. ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

Morrice nodded. ‘I understand. I have forgotten you again.’ Shay smiled.

Blackburn looked between them uneasily. ‘Who—’

‘Quiet, boy.’ Morrice glanced only briefly at his subordinate. ‘There is an older, deeper world; and you go softly when you feel its shadows on you.’ He gestured with his bread. ‘We’re grateful for the vittles, stranger.’ His tongue cleared a piece of loaf from his cheek. ‘What do you seek of us, or what do you offer?’

‘Escape.’ Hope and wariness flickering on the faces. ‘Escape to the Continent, by quicker, surer means than you’ve managed in recent days.’ He leaned forwards. ‘Unless you’ll stay in England to continue the fight. We’re not done yet.’

He’d not expected otherwise of these shipwrecked men, but the uncomfortable flinchings in the faces were still a disappointment.

‘We would, but—’

‘We’re excepted.’ Blackburn, with a strange mix of bitterness and defiance. ‘We’re dead men.’

‘Excepted?’

‘In the negotiations for the fall of Pontefract, the Parliamentary commanders offered mercy for all but six men. We’re two of them. They catch us, they hang us regardless.’

‘Why?’

Again the hesitation, but again Blackburn picked up the conversation. Food and drink – and conversation too, no doubt; they’d unlikely exchanged a sentence in days; Shay recognized the signs – had restored a youth’s self-assurance and pride. ‘The Colonel for he led the defence against them so long. I for my part in – in a certain exploit.’ He took a swig of wine. ‘That’s why we had to escape.’

‘Exploit?’ Exception was rare for those who had not commanded; some egregious little savagery on the edge of the battle, inflated by a victor’s affronted morality? ‘What – you mean the killing of that Colonel? Rainsborough, was that him?’ 

A flicker of discomfort again.

‘Lad, if they knew enough to except you for it, you’ll lose nothing by telling me, whoever I am.’

Blackburn chewed this for a second, trying to hold the pride in his eyes. Then he nodded cockily. ‘That was him.’ Another swig. ‘That was him, dying like a dog in the gutter, and well-deserved.’

Shay listened with a kind of fondness.
Ah, the brittle bravado of the boys.
‘We had no fouler enemy, or so I hear.’
We old men have built our world upon it.
‘Lord knows why you chanced it, but it was the boldest thing.’

Blackburn was obviously used to the criticism. ‘Maybe you’d say it was reckless, but—’

‘Young man, I’ve been doing stupid things on battlefields these thirty years. You may trust me to know boldness, and to understand it.’ It wasn’t just flattery. ‘Nonetheless, I admire your notion of a morning’s sport.’

‘They said he truly was a beast.’ Blackburn was softer; the older man’s respect had promoted him to a status with which he was not yet comfortable. ‘It did our people good to see that we could bite back.’

‘Indeed.’ Shay stood, and walked to the barn door, and checked that morning had not yet come to the farm. He was talking as he returned to his little perch on the box. ‘I have a curious wish to know more of that incident. A good tale, I fancy.’

‘Wait, lad.’ Blackburn found his Colonel’s hand on his arm. ‘We’ll not put ropes around other men’s necks.’ This to Shay. ‘You’ve had your fill from two desperate men, and we’ve told you no more than you’d get from any Roundhead sentry in Doncaster.’ Morrice sat more upright, and then coughed harshly. The words came hoarse. ‘But I’ll not risk the name of one of my men. I don’t send a man out to parley unprotected – not without the man opposite me has an equal stake at forfeit.’

Shay scowled. For some reason he wanted to hear more about the death of Rainsborough.
You don’t know what you don’t know.

Morrice was managing to hold his eyes; Shay had begun to like this Colonel greatly.

Silence, and then a great breath. ‘Very well. I am Sir Mortimer Shay.’ He stared at them bleakly. ‘With what else you know of what I can do, you know enough to hang me too.’

‘Shay. . .’ Morrice breathed the word in a wonder of memory. ‘I thought I knew your face, sir, but it’s twenty years since. Your name was become a secret whisper, or a curse.’ He gestured as if to move Blackburn forward. ‘Tell him the names, boy.’

‘Sir?’

Morrice was still watching Shay. ‘If he’s true, he is the last best hope of England. If he’s false, we are doomed regardless. Tell him.’

In April of that year, a stranger was moving among the regiments of the Army of Parliament. Perhaps more than one stranger. In the Army encampments on Blackheath, and at Salisbury, and perhaps elsewhere, a man might be felt at a shoulder, or seen behind a tent, or heard through a shifting screen of leaves. The voice – the voices – spoke of John Lilburne’s honest cause, of the birthrights of ordinary Englishmen, of old liberties and new glories, of fair pay to the men who were dying on behalf of other men. The words breathed and gusted and echoed, as racy jokes and angry debates and promises pregnant with miracle. The Leveller cause was furtive talk around the fire and silly drunken boasting and earnest political persuasion. The voice – the voices – murmured among groups, and pushed hard and insistent at known agitators, and sometimes an officer would think he’d overheard something before settling back less easy to his routine. A shoulder was patted; a shilling was passed.

Shay’s first hearing of the death of Colonel Thomas Rainsborough was in a Lancashire barn, the occasional distant cock-crow a little stab of their increasing vulnerability.

‘Guess you’d say there were four of us,’ Blackburn said with artificial deliberation. ‘Four who led it, one way or another. Five maybe.’ He was cross-legged on the floor, leaning back against the ramshackle planks of the wall. ‘It was the grandest thing you ever saw.’

‘Four or five?’ Shay tried to make the interjection relaxed, interested. He didn’t want to delay in this stuck-out unknown trap of a place, but he didn’t want to hustle the boy into inaccuracy.

‘Captain Paulden – Captain William Paulden – he had the idea mainly. He spoke to Lieutenant Austwick about some men for it. Then they came to me’ – a little glance at his Colonel in fear of contradiction – ‘as my troop were known for lively fellows – rather jump a big ditch than a small.’ He paused, wondering where to take the story next, and saw the question on his listener’s face. ‘And there was a civilian. Always close to Captain Paulden, he was. Name of Teach; Miles Teach.’

Teach indeed. The wildest dare, the quietest report of it.

‘That was the four of us, anyway, with my men behind. Captain William’s brother was with us, and he usually knew what was going on.’ He’d leaned forward into the question, and now returned to his studied relaxation against the wall. ‘It was the grandest thing you ever saw,’ he said again, and this time Shay let him run. ‘We’d all been locked up tight in Pontefract all those weeks, and then to be charging free across the country like that, wild and free. . .’ Morrice started to cough again, and Blackburn waited for him to subside. ‘We came out of the dawn at them, scattered their pickets while your eye was blinking, and charged into the town. Then we had to be more careful, see? Thing like this, it takes subtlety.’ Shay nodded. It did take subtlety, and he wondered who had provided it. ‘We’d got through the gate right enough, and the guards were all dead and fleeing, but we knew they’d spread the alarm soon enough. So we had to be quick. But we couldn’t make a fuss. Way we were dressed, we could be soldiers from either side. Didn’t want to stir anything in the street unless we had to. So now we’re going at the trot, all calm and unthreatening, and all the time waiting for the trumpets to blast behind us!’