Traitor's Field (35 page)

At this time, the Widow Carroll kept a house in St Mary’s Gate, in Derby, with her nieces. St Mary’s Gate was one of the unmarked borders of the town, between the affluent centre and the slums beyond. It was a street of trade, of bustle, of the ebb and flow of rich and poor, fine clothes brightening the mud and every kind of accent to be heard haggling; so the Widow Carroll and her nieces lived unremarked, although the nieces might fetch a second glance in their regular visits to church.

Derby neither knew nor cared whether there had ever been a Mr Carroll, or the exact link between widow and nieces. A set of women living alone must find some convenient tale or other and, after all, the establishment was intended precisely for the temporary escape from family bonds. At the Widow’s, reached by any of a number of alleys and then a discreet side door, a man might find exultation, inspiration or obliteration, a memory or a forgetting, or just a few minutes of warmth in the night-time of the world.

Michael Manders was an occasional guest. In visits to the Widow’s he had passed from ill-disguised ignorance to a confident pose of bravado, and he would tell select acquaintances that it allowed him to pursue his more appropriate romances without unseemly urges complicating them. The Widow’s had been one of his first destinations on his return from the dream-like rescue of the two strange old men at Nottingham Castle, a chance to recapture his certainty and his poise, and several months later it had more than done its work.

Coming downstairs into the under-lit parlour, groin aching cosily and the last of a goblet of wine in his hand, he found the Widow waiting for him as always. As always the suggestion of a curtsey, and then she was passing him his cloak. After the cloak, the hat, and as he took it Manders noticed a fragment of paper protruding from under the ribbon that circled the crown.

A little stab of confusion; an innocuous paper snake in this paradise. 

His eyes shifted up to the small impassive face of the Widow, but hers were down. Why would she—? Who would know—? Instinctively he started to speak, but she had turned away, and what would he have said anyway?

Manders was suddenly uneasy in the place, a flush of innocence or piety lurching in him, and he hurried out and away. He got well clear, the hat still clutched in his two hands, before he pulled the paper from under the ribbon and held it up under a lantern.

A small square of paper, folded once. On it a single word: ‘Shenley’, with the number 1 below it.

The arcane message made the discomfort worse. Manders stared at the mad puzzle a moment longer, then crumpled and thrust it into a pocket and hurried from the alleys into the more familiar part of town.

A life: John Blakiston was born in Sedgefield, in County Durham, and baptized in Durham Cathedral, where his father held a post. But from that bewildering splash onwards, Blakiston and his father would only move apart on matters of faith. Blakiston senior’s resistance to the newer religious teachings put him in harmony with his King, but in growing disagreement with his son. John Blakiston’s success as a young man of business – in textiles and then in coal – made him increasingly impatient with the conservatism and hierarchism of his father and the other men of influence in the locality. Puritanism started as a practical and psychological comfort to Blakiston, and became a growing conviction. The influence of his relationship with his father on this trend is only speculation, as is the influence of his wife, an older widow who brought into the relationship a merchant’s fortune and a strong reforming belief.

Increasingly influential in his region, and opposed to the tendencies of the King, Blakiston was a Member of Parliament in the early 1640s and then Mayor of Newcastle in 1645: a man of wealth, a man of prominence, and a man in accord with the times. It was a surprise to no one when he was one of the first to sign the King’s death warrant.

By June of 1649 he was in his mid-forties, a man of stately reputation but still fit and active. It was accordingly more of a surprise when, having eaten his usual hearty midday meal and set out for his usual walk afterwards, John Blakiston was found under a tree, his face locked in a torment, dead.

His death was ascribed variously to a heart attack, to shock, and to the work of demons peculiarly active in the north-east that summer. Such are the times.

The times are also of rumour, and suspicion, and such a chatter of papers as no human society has known before. Thomas Scot held a paper in each hand, and he presented the first to Thurloe and Tarrant.

A crumpled page – read, crushed in anger, and then re-smoothed.

[SS C/T/49/22]

‘The surgeon said it was natural.’ Tarrant didn’t offer it as contradiction, merely the only related fact he could find.

‘Cut off a man’s head, he dies,’ Scot said sharply; ‘that’s natural. Cut his throat and he bleeds to death, naturally. Poison him and he dies, and that’s natural too.’

He handed over the second paper.

[SS C/T/49/23]

‘This one hardly makes sense,’ Thurloe said.

‘Royalist assassins make sense,’ Scot snapped back. ‘We have trifled with these traitors for too long.’

Tarrant produced a noise from his throat, of agreement.

‘One of these can’t be true,’ Thurloe said quietly. ‘And since it’s unlikely that they’d be circulating at the same time by accident, I’m somehow less convinced by both. Perhaps Tarrant’s surgeon was right after all.’

Scot’s head dropped closer, the nose and jaw jutting forward. ‘You do concede that Blakiston is dead, do you, Thurloe? You do concede that there is someone out there circulating these threats?’ He stood again, as if suddenly repulsed. ‘And you know what effect these will be having around the town.’ He turned and stalked away, Thurloe nodding thoughtfully and watching him go.

‘Old man’s unhappy.’ Tarrant said it with a strange pride of knowledge, and an expression that made it then an accusation. He leaned closer. ‘Because he doesn’t like these conspiracies.’

‘Mm.’ Thurloe was deliberately avoiding Tarrant’s face, and comparing the two papers. ‘Also, presumably, because he too signed the King’s death warrant.’

Thomas Balfour at dice: a compact and silent rock at the table, hands moving minimally and mechanically, eyes flicking around the faces of the others, then down to the dice. Ivory eyes that jump and then settle, the pupils hard and fixed: aces.

He felt the stiffness in his neck, and the first drifts of wine-fog at the edge of his brain. He’d been here long enough, now. Not too much longer. He was up, but hard-fought and barely, and soon he’d get reckless. 

Patter and rattle and click across the table. Good to be a dicing man: a game of mental stamina, an experience of intensity, a world for serious men only. A fellowship of lonely concentrating men. Vyse, he knew, was scared by the dark disreputability, and the cheerless focus made Manders uneasy; they would never accompany him here.

Patter and rattle and click across the table, his eyes jumped after the dice, and he reached for his wine. Some unnatural catch in the movement, an extra touch of confusion on the margin of his brain – enough; he set down the goblet without drinking – and then felt, distinctly, the pull of a hand reaching into his pocket.

Eyes momentarily wide and hard, and then calculation:
How well do I know this place? How well do I know these men?

He sat back; resisted the urge to reach for the violated pocket. The wall was close behind him – unwindowed; he could visualize it – and the only two spectators were across the room. The dice chattered again, but he was oblivious. The only movement in his widened vision was a servant, leaving with a tray.

Patter and rattle and click across the table, and he stood, gave an empty gesture of reassurance to the few eyes that had watched him, and followed the man out. The door gave onto a muddy yard, the servant trudging across it towards an outhouse with the tray ill-balanced. Come at him from the side? More chance of being seen. How to follow? Balfour set off across the yard after his man, trying to match the timing of the paces but making his own longer. At the outhouse, at the door, with that tray, he’ll be more distracted. Across the yard, a fierce clutch at a shoulder and the servant wrenched round and the tray slewing against the wall and clattering and squelching into the mud and Balfour’s forearm slamming the man back against the wall and a knife-point at his throat.

‘I’m a charitable man,’ he hissed, ‘but at my own choosing. I’ll take it back or I’ll take your tongue.’

A high choke: ‘What— I took – I took nothing!’ The blade-point pricking the skin, and a yelp: ‘Before God! Check – check!’

What had been in the pocket, after all?

‘A stranger – paid me a shilling – if I put a paper in your pocket!’

Balfour switched hands on the knife, felt for the pocket, felt the paper inside. Eased back half a pace, and pulled it out. The man took his chance and bolted, stumbling and sliding across the yard and away into the darkness. 

Back on the edge of the dice room, unwatched, Balfour unfolded the paper next to a lantern. A single word: ‘Cross’, with the number 3 written below it.

He collected his cloak and his meagre winnings, and left, confusion and then half a smile.

Henry Vyse was early for his customary rendezvous with Manders and Balfour, and he was pacing and impatient in the church porch when they arrived one after the other.

‘You’re late!’

‘I was exact to time.’ Balfour. ‘You were hasty, Hal. What sport today, gentlemen?’

‘Wait!’ Vyse again. ‘I have to tell you – the strangest incident. . .’ The others turned back to the porch, studying the pale excited face in its gloom. ‘Yesterday evening, I went to St John’s folly, for – well—’

Balfour: ‘For a liaison. We know.’

Manders, face full and hearty: ‘Ah, sweet Charlotte! It is still sweet Charlotte, is it not? The fairy princess of Rounceby Hall?’

‘Well, I don’t—’

‘Charlotte Adair. We know.’

‘Great Gods, Vyse, if I’d been at her this long I’d have—’

Vyse lurching forward, hot and hand on dagger: ‘If you even think that thought Manders, I’ll cut your throat.’

‘Steady, old fellow. A thousand pardons if I’ve sullied the dream.’

‘She didn’t come, anyway.’

‘Ah. Sorry for you there, old lad. Her sister, now—’

‘Listen, damn you! Time by time she is unable to come, and she – well, she leaves a small note – in a place known only to us.’ A jovial Manders opening to speak, then Balfour’s hand on his arm. ‘There was a note. And a damned sweet one it was too. But inside it – slipped inside it – there was another paper.’

Balfour, colder now: ‘For an old sovereign, Hal: a single word, and a number.’

Manders suddenly on edge: ‘You too?’

Vyse was wide-eyed. ‘You both had notes?’ Two nods, and Vyse took a breath. ‘But I’ll take your sovereign, Tom. Mine has two words.’